Faces: Portraits of Strangers on the Road

Some of the portraits I care about most were not planned at all. These three were made while travelling: strangers who let me point a camera at them for a minute, and gave back far more than a minute’s worth.

The first is a young girl in a doorway, chin resting on her hand, red nail varnish and a half-smile that needed no directing from me. The other two were made in Kathmandu: a portrait of a woman with a bindi, which I kept in black and white, and a close-up of a very elderly lady wearing strings of bead necklaces, whose face carries more history than I could ever caption.

With portraits like these the photographer’s job is small — be polite, be quick, and get the eyes sharp. The faces do the rest.