Unposed

The commission was open-ended: six portraits for the magazine's spring issue, with no subject brief beyond "people you'd want to look at twice." We chose to make the question of posing the subject of the work.

You cannot ask someone to be unposed. You can only catch them on the way to a pose, or on the way back from one.

We worked from extensive references and many candidate generations per subject — fifty to a hundred — selecting the frames that looked the least arrived-at. The aim was the moment before a sitter remembers they are being photographed.

Each subject sat for two short sessions, separated by a day. The second session was almost always the one we used; the first carried, in the faces, the residue of having been told what was about to happen.

The series ran across twelve pages of the issue, sequenced with the magazine's own writing. We delivered one image per subject, and a small set of alternates for the layout team.