On being

A portrait is not a performance. It is a permission. You sit, someone looks at you for an hour with a camera between you, and at some point you stop trying. That is when the picture happens — not when you smile, not when you turn your chin three degrees to the left, but when you forget.

The people I photograph are almost always a little nervous for the first ten minutes. That is fine. We talk about the weather, I make coffee, I ask about their grandmother. By the time the camera comes out, the room has relaxed around them.

The best portraits, I think, are the ones where the subject looks as though they had just remembered something.

I work slowly on purpose. Forty-five minutes, maybe fifteen frames, and then we stop. The pictures you keep are not the ones where you posed well. They are the ones where someone saw you.