How do you make a portrait of a random person who is simply navigating their daily life and minding their own business?

Well the first thing you must do is interrupt them from whatever it is they’re doing to ask them if you can make their portrait.

People Interrupted is a project that was inspired by some street portrait work my friend Kenneth Wajda had been doing. I needed to try something new with my craft, and walking up to complete strangers to strike up a conversation about making their portrait was certainly something new. Getting outside of your comfort zone is the perfect thing to boost the creative juices. So I started interrupting people.

I use a TLR camera for the project. The main reasons are its size and its ability to put people at ease. I have found that people genuinely enjoy having their photograph taken with the odd little camera. I like showing them how a TLR works, allowing them to peer down into the view finder. It’s always a “Wow” moment the first time they look down into a TLR camera and see the bright vibrant image on the ground glass.

Every image represents a person or people that I interrupted, and each image represents a short human interaction I had with them. We seem to have a self-checkout or some sort of kiosk for so many things now. Those were once small human interactions that were dotted across your everyday. For some time now those little moments of “niceties” and “polite exchanges” have been getting engineered out of our daily lives.  This photography project has had the unexpected benefit of replenishing some of those human interactions that had been engineered away.

It’s good for the mind and body when we interact and socialize with each other. I get such a great feeling after I’ve gone out with the Yashica, met new people, had some conversations, and gotten to know just a small bit about those I encountered.

This is a project that I will continue to work on for as long as I am able.