Both sides of the camera

I spend half my working life looking through a viewfinder and the other half being looked at through one. People assume the two jobs are opposites. They are the same job at different distances.

Every photograph of a person is a negotiation. The only question is whether both people know it.

When I model, I can feel the difference between a photographer who has decided the picture already and one who is still listening. The first gets exactly what they imagined, which is usually less than what was available. The second gets the frame neither of us planned — the one that ends up in the book.

So when I am the one holding the camera, I try to be the second kind. I over-explain nothing. I wait — film teaches that anyway — and I let the person arrive in the frame instead of placing them there.

It works on strangers in the street, it works in the studio, and it works, embarrassingly, on me: the pictures of myself I actually like were all taken by people who were listening.