Joshua Amirthasingh’s Tales from the City is a photographic study of San Francisco, the city he has made his home. Published by Nazraeli Press in 2025, the book attends not to a catalogue of landmarks but to subdued incidents within the city’s daily movement. Passing figures, ordinary streets and fleeting shifts in atmosphere become the elements of an urban narrative built from observation rather than spectacle.

Amirthasingh’s approach is shaped by two related impulses: nostalgia for the energy of his childhood in India and an affinity for cinematic storytelling. That personal history gives his San Francisco photographs a productive doubleness. The city is encountered as a present-tense environment, yet it also becomes a screen for memory, association and imagined stories. Familiar scenes remain slightly unsettled, poised between recognition and surprise.

Light and weather provide the project with its central visual language. The warmth of the golden hour and San Francisco’s diffuse fog do more than establish mood; their alternation helps organize the photographs as episodes in a larger fiction. Amirthasingh searches within the city’s bustle for moments of suspension, when people and surroundings briefly seem detached from ordinary time. The resulting dreamlike quality is restrained rather than theatrical, grounded in the conditions of the street.

In its compact, 48-page hardcover form, Tales from the City offers collectors a concentrated example of contemporary urban photography organized around atmosphere, memory and narrative suggestion. Its significance lies in the consistency with which a specific place is transformed without losing its everyday character. Rather than explaining San Francisco, Amirthasingh leaves room for the reader to connect its fog, light and quiet encounters with private recollections of other cities and other times.