A well-known figure in American street photography, Ydeen arrives in Morocco and Egypt with the series Waiting for Palms, on view at the Galleria Bruno Lisi in Rome until 19 December 2025, curated by Camilla Boemio. Speaking to Domus, Ydeen and Boemio discuss how to observe places and people without falling into stereotypes, “turning the gaze into listening and photography into experience.”

From department stores to highways, from motels to gas stations: Ydeen began by photographing the America closest to him, following in the footsteps of Walker Evans and the New Topographics photographers. His series Easton Nights later marked his breakthrough, depicting — through a landscape of neon signs and nocturnal atmospheres — the Pennsylvania town where he moved in 2011.

In the years that followed, his research broadened to include highway routes toward New York and more intimate formats such as digital slideshows, which have unexpectedly returned to prominence in contemporary photography.

In Italy, Ydeen found an especially attentive interlocutor: curator Camilla Boemio, who authored the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. She has been collaborating with him since 2021, between Rome and Los Angeles. “Ydeen is a careful wanderer, capable of negotiating between his vision and the lives of the people he encounters,” she tells Domus.

This sensibility led him, with Waiting for Palms, well beyond American borders.

Flip-flops on asphalt, sand-coloured buildings, garments grazing the ground: Waiting for Palms marks a decisive move toward a more immersive street photography. Produced between 2016 and 2017 and still ongoing, the series weaves together human figures, public spaces, and everyday details into a visual fabric that blends tradition and modernity, monumentality and small gestures.

Peter Ydeen

The photographer explains that he often shot the same subjects multiple times from different angles. But, he notes, the crucial element was the local driver who accompanied him throughout the journey, enabling him to move freely and reach places that would otherwise have been inaccessible.

A clear choice emerges: that of balancing curiosity and responsibility, avoiding the clichés that often shape visual depictions of North Africa.
“I approached the work with my outsider’s perspective, aware that this influences how places and people are seen. Each image is a negotiation between my vision and the lives of the people I encountered,” says Ydeen.

For the first time in his work, the human figures are not isolated but integrated into the landscape. Softer tones, less saturated colours, and less geometric compositions than in Easton Nights reveal a more porous, contemplative approach. “Flexibility is one of his great strengths,” Boemio observes. “With Waiting for Palms, he advances a conceptual evolution: a photography that does not frame, but receives.”

Camilla Boemio

Boemio connects this posture to Notes for an African Orestes, the film-documentary Pier Paolo Pasolini shot in Uganda and Tanzania in 1970: an attempt — then as now — to approach a distant reality not to interpret it, but to listen to it.

Both works, she notes, seek “a gaze that resembles listening, a state of grace.”

Ydeen offers a vision of North Africa freed from the dominant codes of exoticism. His images combine monumentality and everyday life with a delicacy that invites viewers to question what it truly means to “see” a place as an outsider.

“If the people I photographed were to see these images,” he concludes, “I hope they would recognise the beauty of the places they pass through every day.”

Perhaps it is to them — more than to us — that this series is addressed.

All images: Waiting for Palms. Foto Peter Ydeen