As the title of this post indicates, I shot this impromptu portrait as I was walking along Muscat Street outside Singapore’s Sultan Mosque. This gentleman was happy to pose. As always, the key is to screw up the courage to ask. Even though he didn’t speak any English, my camera made it obvious what I was asking of him.
Revisiting this image, I’m reminded of why I never travel on tours. To capture an image like this takes time, or at least the illusion of time. It’s important for me to present as someone with all the time in the world, or at least as someone who has the time to pay attention to the person sitting right in front of me. Tours are frenetic affairs where a guide whisks you one place for five minutes and then the next and then the next with hardly time to get your bearings. In a situation like that, I could never relax enough to establish a connection with a subject. I prefer to plop myself in a city and then work things out in my own time. Part of that is just me: I’m slow and methodical. To be honest, when I have a camera in my hands, I’m frustrating to be around. Just ask my wife. I lose myself in the process.
This wraps up a month of street portraits. On to a new project. While portraits are by no means the mainstay of my practice, for personal reasons, I regard them as essential. Portraits force me to do what makes me most uncomfortable. I am an introvert and, years ago, found myself overtaken by a paralysing anxiety. The combination of introversion and anxiety militates against spontaneously striking up conversations with strangers. For me, the practice of street portraiture serves as a form of desensitization. Go gently at first, doing only what feels comfortable, rewarding myself for my successes, taking it easy on myself for my failures, and gradually pushing myself into increasingly uncomfortable situations. Looking back over the years, the results of this strategy have been startling. Now, the biggest impediment to taking good street portraits is the fact that so many people obscure their faces with masks.
