Urban Ghosts: How Stefan Czurda’s Abstract Street Photography Captures the Emotions We Overlook
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Street photography isn’t about documenting reality—it’s about capturing what we fail to see.
Most people walk through the streets without noticing the emotions around them. But for Stefan Czurda, those fleeting moments of feeling are everything. His photography turns everyday people into ghostly figures, preserving emotions that would otherwise disappear. Instead of capturing sharp details, he embraces motion blur and abstraction to highlight what we often overlook.
Czurda focuses on contrasts, light, and movement to create images that feel both mysterious and emotional. His series Street Melancholy explores loneliness in today’s fast-paced world, while Her Journey takes a more personal approach, using street portraits to tell an emotional story over the course of a year.
At the heart of his work is one idea: emotions matter more than perfect images. Whether photographing strangers or working on long-term projects, Czurda’s goal is to preserve feelings that might otherwise go unnoticed.
This made me wonder - what if the most powerful street photographs are the least clear?
Stefan Czurda’s Urban Ghosts - Capturing Emotion Through Abstract Street Photography
It is emotions that give depth to your work, and there should always be a part of yourself in your photography!
These are the two most important aspects for me on my journey as a street photographer.
Understanding them was the first step, but then comes the execution—something that should be a playful and flowing process.
My name is Stefan Czurda, and I am an abstract street photographer from Vienna, Austria. I seek to capture emotional moments of everyday life on the streets and experiment with motion blur to create abstract street portraits, which I call Urban Ghosts.
Capturing emotions on the streets
Alexey Titarenkos “City of Shadows” series has greatly influenced my artistic work. Additionally, I have been impacted by the creative contributions of Saul Leiter and contemporary photographer Olga Karlovac.
For me, the emotions of my fellow human beings take center stage—only then does the actual visual aesthetic come into play. I prefer to keep things relatively simple: I focus on contrasts, tonal values, and sometimes the interplay of colors.
At times, I get very close to my subjects, yet through the blur, I preserve their identity and integrity, ensuring they remain mostly unrecognizable through abstraction and so my protagonists become ghosts.
The art lies in preserving facial expressions, gestures, and the emotions they convey despite the blur. This abstract representation beautifully highlights them, making it a fundamental aspect of my photography. I also like to add a touch of mysticism and melancholy to my work.
And so, I roam the streets of my hometown, Vienna, always in search of emotions to capture—so they are not forgotten. The beauty of it all lies in the fleeting nature of these moments, which I can preserve through my photography.
In my first series, Street Melancholy, which I am still working on, I explore this transience through melancholic moments. My goal was to show that in our fast-paced world, we hardly notice the emotions of those around us. Instead, we often rush through the streets with our phones in hand, taking selfies rather than interacting with each other.
When someone is sad or experiencing a sorrowful moment, we no longer perceive it. Our empathy has faded, replaced by self-promotion. Social media platforms like Instagram only amplify this unhealthy trend.
Melancholy serves as a guiding theme in my work because it is deeply expressive. However, it also represents all the emotions we fail to recognize in one another today—perhaps because we are too consumed with ourselves. Seeking out and capturing these emotions is, for me, also a way to reawaken my own empathy and bring it back into my present.
While Street Melancholy critiques modern society and our rushed existence, it is also personal—it reflects the empathy I often find lacking in others but feel within myself.
In my new project, Her Journey, I have taken a different approach to the theme of emotions.
Her Journey is an entirely personal story. This time, I wanted to explore a part of my own emotional world and express it through a short story, accompanied by street portraits of a young woman named Marjetta, the protagonist of the story.
Unlike my previous work, which was based on chance encounters in the streets, this project involved working intentionally with one person over the course of an entire year.
Our first shoot took place on a very cold winter day in downtown Vienna. The photos felt atmospheric and powerful, and the emotional coldness of winter, which I often experience myself, became a source of inspiration. From this, the idea of a series emerged—one that, inspired by Antonio Vivaldi, follows the cycle of the four seasons.
However, the story starts in spring and depicts the quiet story of a girl who wanders through the four seasons with the weight of her worries & sadness, struggling to navigate her emotions. At times, a glimmer of hope emerges; at others, the burden feels almost unbearable.
Working with a single person felt different for me. I planned more unlike my usual approach to street photography. Despite the planning, still a lot happened spontaneously—something that defines my photography and reminds me that I am not a photographer who should plan too much.
One of the biggest challenges was finding the right locations that matched the season and capturing Marjetta’s melancholic mood in a way that aligned with my story. Every season has its own unique character, reflecting an emotional atmosphere that I wanted to convey visually. While spring evokes hope, the bleakness of winter is meant to fade away soon. Summer and autumn serve as transitional seasons, preparing for the emotions that will become more pronounced in the following season.
Additionally, I aimed to create three images per series that would complement each other. Selecting the right images for each season was not easy, as Marjetta’s emotions also had to align with the aesthetics of the season. The story developed gradually—I started with a concept that evolved over time.
Overall, it was a significant challenge, much more difficult than my usual street photography, where I rely solely on my instincts.
So how does Her Journey connect my own emotional world?
In a somewhat less intense form, I experience the same emotional world as Marjetta in Her Journey.
Through my photography, which centers on emotions, I can express my reflective thoughts. This gives them a space outside of myself, allowing me to organize and process them. Processing my personal world felt incredibly liberating. Expressing my emotions through photography is not only freeing but also adds much greater depth and meaning to my creative work.
You are welcome to read the short story on my website if you like.
What truly matters to me is that people who view my images don’t just see them—they feel them.
Aesthetics and visual language are important tools, but in the end, my mission is to capture and preserve the emotions of everyday life so they are never lost. It can be the emotions of others, or my own, but a part of myself will always be reflected in my photography.
