I have never wanted to photograph two people exactly the same way, but every person I photograph benefits in some way from the people who came before her.
Every portrait that worked better than I expected is always with me and so is every idea that didn’t. So are the clients who chose images I would not have expected her to choose and every family that reminded me there will always be more than one ‘perfectt’ photograph, as well as every person who required something from me that I hadn’t needed to offer the person before her. None of those experiences tells me what I should create next, but none of them disappear simply because the session ended either.
The photographer who walks into future sessions contains pieces of every session that came before it.
I cannot say there was one particular session that altered everything, or a certain client who sent my work in an entirely new direction because most of what has become part of the way I photograph people happened gradually. It happened through the people, photographs, conversations, decisions, successes, mistakes, and the occasional idea that became something far better than I had ever imagined.
And no, that doesn’t mean the next person inherits anyone else’s session. If anything, all of that allows me to begin with more possibilities than before rather than fewer.
I remember a time when I thought being able to offer more meant being able to be everything to everyone. I certainly don’t believe that anymore. In many ways, knowing my own work has given me the room to respond to the person in front of me, because I no longer need every decision to prove what kind of photographer I am.
My clients have played a considerable part in that. There are images I know I love the instant I create them, and by the time we sit down for her reveal, there are always a few I am especially excited for her to see. Sometimes we agree immediately. Other times, she is drawn to something I wouldn’t have predicted at all. What I bring to a photograph as its creator and what my client brings to it through her own life aren’t always the same. That realization added another layer to the way I create for the person in front of me and it affected the experience I wanted my clients to have with me each time.
There are certainly other things that have become part of the way I work much less noticeably. A solution I found because something wasn’t going according to plan. A question I learned to ask because another one wasn’t giving me the information I needed. An idea I almost abandoned before trying it one more time. A client who required something different from me because of something I couldn’t have anticipated. None of those experiences became a formula for the next person, but each one leaves me with another possibility for future clients.
This is one of the things I value most about continuing to photograph people. Everything I have learned has not left me with a collection of answers I simply apply to the next person. It has given me more places to begin, more possibilities to consider, and more experience to draw from when something asks for a different approach.
There is certainly more that I know now, but knowing more hasn’t made me any less curious. I want to know who someone is, what matters to her, what she responds to, what she might need from me, and what we might create together that neither of us could have arrived at in quite the same way with someone else.
And no, not through some dramatic reinvention, and not by abandoning what I believed about portraiture every time I discover something new. The parts of my work that matter most to me have become stronger with time. The way I see and create a portrait is still distinctly mine, but what has expanded around it is everything I have learned by putting those beliefs into practice with real people rather than leaving them as ideas about the kind of photographer I want to be.
Every session asks me to use what I already know without assuming it is all I will need.
I think there is something wonderful about that. The woman I photograph next will never receive the session I created for the woman before her, but she will benefit from it. She will benefit from every time I had to find another solution, every photograph that surprised me, every client who showed me another way of seeing the work we created, and every experience that added something to what I am capable of bringing with me.
And when her session is finished, I will carry something from it forward too. Not her photographs or her experience, because those belong to her, but something I learned because I had the opportunity to create them with her.
Then, when the next person walks through my door, the photographer who meets them will have something to offer that she didn’t have before.