Asking to photograph strangers. Also not asking.
I’m not much of a portrait photographer—just not enough experience or practice with it—but I’d like to get better at photographing willing participants. That includes barely willing participants, as strangers in the street often are when someone they don’t know approaches them with a camera and asks to capture their image.
A couple people have told me to fuck off, most ask why I want to photograph them, some are friendly, others are extremely skeptical but let it happen anyway, and some just don’t seem to care either way.
Approaching people is not easy for me. Photography is something I treat as a largely personal endeavor, and making intentional portraits of strangers (of anyone, really) is a departure from my usual approach to shooting—the quiet observer seeking subjects in the streets, looking to tell stories or capture kenopsia in single images.
On a recent overcast Saturday I joined a couple friends at a pretty large photo walk, organized by the Lecia San Francisco store and a local photographer/influencer called Dave Herring. To help frame the event, there was a collection of suggested prompts flashed on a large screen: “joy,” “unusual perspective,” “interesting light,” a few others, and most notably to me, “portrait of a stranger.” Perfect.
Hitting the streets with literally 100 other photographers is definitely…conspicuous. I generally avoid packs of people roaming with cameras but I have to admit that it was helpful in getting started with approaching people for portraits—apparently, seeing a ton of photographers running around makes people more open to being photographed. Maybe the crowd makes the lone photographer asking strangers if they’ll sit, or stand, for a portrait seem less creepy.
We were set to spend two hours walking the Chinatown Broadway loop starting at the Leica Store on Bush Street—so, from the Chinatown gate up to City Lights Book Store and back. I moved through a couple packs of people I was familiar with for the first block or two, then broke away a bit with a couple folks, a good friend and another photographer who we’d just met. When we got to the Broadway turnaround point, we realized that we had well over an hour before we were meant to rendezvous back at Leica, so we kept walking into North Beach.
During the walk I asked some people for portraits, and snapped a few that I’m happy with—as well as a portrait of a friend at the post-walk event—but I also managed to snap several street shots along the way. Because that’s just what my eye is tuned for. So the photo set below contains a mix of those things.
In a departure from my usual medium of black & white film, I was shooting digital with a Leica M10 Monochrom that I picked up used a couple years ago. As the name suggests, it’s a digital camera that doesn’t have a color sensor so it only shoots black & white. Sometimes I wonder why I spent so much on a digital camera that only shoots black and white, and then I take some photos with it and remember why.
The camera is so great to shoot with—manual aperture and focus, easy-to-manage ISO and shutter settings, fast and whisper silent operation. The images (the keepers, anyway) come straight out of the camera practically perfect. I drop them into Lightroom, maybe crop or straighten a bit as needed, sometimes tweak the levels ever so slightly. Otherwise, they’re good. It’s kinda uncanny.
I don’t use this camera enough. Maybe 2026 is the year I lean into portraiture, with the M10 Monochrom.
