JOURNAL — 21 MAY 2026

PHOTOGRAPHING SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T LIKE CAMERAS

The best portraits I've made are often of people who told me, honestly, that they hated having their picture taken.

Almost every portrait session starts the same way, with some version of the sentence: "I should warn you, I don't photograph well." I've learned to treat that sentence as useful information rather than an obstacle — it usually means the person is bracing for a kind of photograph I have no intention of making.

What people dislike, in my experience, isn't being photographed. It's being photographed the way stock photography and school portraits have trained them to expect: a fixed pose, a held smile, a version of themselves flattened into a single expression they didn't choose.

So with a reluctant subject, I usually put the camera down first. We talk. I ask about the room we're in, or the thing on their desk, or whatever they were doing before I arrived. The camera comes back up once the conversation has taken over from the awareness of being watched.

It doesn't always work quickly. Some sessions take twice as long as a comfortable subject would need. But the photographs that come out of that slower process are almost always the ones the person is surprised to actually like — because for once, nobody asked them to perform being photogenic.