How to ask a stranger if you may take their portrait

The most common question I am asked is technical: what lens, what settings, what light. The question I am almost never asked is the one that actually decides the portrait — how do you get a stranger to let you that close.

There is no trick. There is only honesty, and a particular kind of slowness.

I do not raise the camera first. I have watched a hundred travellers do this — they see a face, lift the lens, fire, and walk on, and what they get is a photograph of someone being startled by a camera. That is not a portrait. That is a small theft. The person knows it, the picture knows it, and you will feel it every time you look at the file.

What I do instead is stop. I put the camera down, somewhere visible, against my chest. I catch the person's eye and I wait to see what comes back. Sometimes it is curiosity, sometimes irritation, sometimes nothing at all, and the reading of that first half-second is most of the job. If the answer is no, it is usually no before a word is spoken, and I move on without a picture and without a grievance.

If there is an opening, I ask — with my hands as often as my voice, because I am usually somewhere my language does not reach. I point at the camera, I point at them, I raise my eyebrows. It is almost comically simple. The simplicity is the point. You are asking permission to look closely at another human being, and there is no clever way to dress that up, so you do not try.

The man with the red turban in the India series twisted his moustache and looked at me for a long moment before he agreed. That moment is in the photograph. He was deciding whether to let me in, and the picture I made is the picture of a man who decided yes — which is a completely different thing from a man who was caught.

When someone says yes, I do not rush to repay the gift by being quick. I slow down further. I make a frame, show them the back of the camera, make another. I let them be part of it. Almost everyone, once they have agreed, wants to do it well, and a portrait made together is worth ten stolen ones.

And when it is over, I say thank you in whatever way I can, and I mean it. The picture is theirs as much as mine. I am only the one who happened to be holding the box.