Start a $2 Portraits Project for Unexpected Encounters on the Street

Photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk has an ongoing project called $2 Portraits in which he gives $2 to people on the street in exchange for a portrait:

[…] I am going to offer $2 to anyone who asks me for money in exchange for their portrait. While I’m taking their portrait I’m going to ask their name and try to learn a little bit about them. I plan on doing this for the rest of my life — assuming that I can afford to.

To make things easier I’m putting $2 in reserve money in a special place in my wallet so that even if I don’t have change I will always have the $2 to hand over.

In part I’m undertaking this project because I realize that I’ve been avoiding people asking me for money. My biggest motivation behind this project however is simply that I think human interaction is a good thing. I’m not doing this to exploit homeless people or show how hard and bad life can be. I’m doing this because I want to celebrate other human beings as human beings and I think that this commercial transaction gives us an opportunity to engage and interact on a more human level… and I also think that I can take a pretty decent portrait.

You can see all of the portraits Hawk has taken so far in his $2 Portraits Flickr set, where he also shares the story behind each photo. If you’d like to start doing the same thing, he also has a Flickr group where people can share their own $2 photographs.