strangers

Anime Conventions: A Great Place to Build Confidence as a Photographer

Perhaps you’ve been through this scenario. You see an interesting subject doing something truly unique, you hesitate and sometimes miss the shot altogether. When you do gather enough courage, your heart races, your palms get sweaty, and a quiver can be heard in your voice as you nervously ask if you can take a person’s picture. Sounds familiar? It can be discouraging if you miss the opportunity and the shot.

Shooting Fashion Photos of Strangers on the Street

NYC-based photographer Dani Diamond took a V-Flat and his portrait skills out to the Jersey Shore and shot fashion photos of complete strangers he ran into. You can see the project and results in this 6.5-minute video by AdoramaTV.

Portraits of Strangers on the Streets of Cuba

For my project "The World I See," I have gone to 19 countries in the last 12 months and walked up to strangers to ask for their photograph. In the beginning, I was just walking up to people, getting their photographs, and then walking away.

Daydreamers: Street Photos of People with Closed Eyes

As a street photographer, I like catching those quiet moments of solitude people have amidst the busy and hectic life of the metropolis. That's how my Daydreamers series was born. While combing through my archives and Instagram posts, I noticed I had a lot of photos of people with their eyes shut.

Portraits of Strangers Found Through Craigslist

For their ongoing "Craigslist Encounters," the Los Angeles-based photography team Kremer Johnson has been shooting portraits of completely strangers who are each found using Craigslist. Each subject responded to an ad titled "Characters Wanted" and agreed to pose for $20 an hour.

Photographer Tracks Down Strangers He Shot 40 Years Ago

Starting about 40 years ago, photographer Chris Porsz began shooting street portraits of strangers he met in his hometown of Peterborough in England. For the past few years, Porsz has been tracking down those subjects and asking them to pose for recreations of those decades-old photos. The ambitious project is titled Reunions.

Overcoming Your Fear of Photographing Strangers

Dear Photographer,

This is one of my favourite subjects I love teaching in my workshops, as most people feel awkward about approaching people on the streets to photograph them.

I Shoot Portraits of Strangers in My Backyard

Editors like to say, "There are great pictures to be made right in your own backyard!"

Come to think of it, there really is a lot going on in my backyard, or at least in my Baltimore back alley. Fugitives from justice have fled down my alley, pursued by police helicopters. I once found a trail of blood that stretched for hundreds of yards. I followed it the whole way, and at the end found a guy with a badly cut hand sitting on a curb.

These 2 Street Photographers Deal with Angry People in Very Different Ways

Street photographers Chuck Jines and Keenan Hastings both uploaded videos this week showing confrontations they had while shooting on the street -- Jines in New Orleans and Hastings in Detroit. They both came across strangers who didn't appreciate their photo being made, but Jines and Hastings had two very different ways of dealing with the situation.

Abstract Portraits of Couples Sleeping in Central Park

Sheep Meadow in New York City's Central Park is a popular spot for sleeping and sunbathing, sometimes drawing tens of thousands of people per day. For his project "Sheep Meadow: Vertical Abstracts," photographer Michael Massaia shot candid portraits of people who are deep in sleep, creating surreal images of intertwined human bodies suspended in darkness.

Using Cigarettes to Connect with Strangers in SF

I visit San Francisco often to walk the streets with camera in hand, hoping to capture life as it happens. Invariably I am asked for change and/or a cigarette. For the most part I try to be generous, but as a non-smoker I’m not able to oblige. I then wondered what would happen if the situation was reversed: instead of being asked for a cigarette I would offer them to random people from all walks of life.

‘Self-Portraits with Men’ Series Explores the ‘What-Ifs’ of Life with Different Partners

Have you ever wondered what you life would be like if you ended up with one of your exes? Or just a random person on the street, somebody whose trajectory in life would have changed your own drastically?

Czech photographer Dita Pepe has, but she took it an step further than most of us when she turned these spousal what-ifs into a series of portraits that take an interesting look at "what might have been" had her family life taken a different direction.

Strangers: A Bizarre Series of Composite Portraits, Each Made Up of 200 Close-Ups

Photographer Pelle Cass is fond of composites. The set of so-called 'single frame time-lapses' he put together for his Selected People series has gone quite viral.

But his fondness for composite photography doesn't stop at creating overcrowded scenes, he applied the same approach to taking portraits, creating a bizarre (and perhaps a little unsettling) series of portraits called Strangers in the process.

BTS: Richard Renaldi Introduces & Poses Complete Strangers on the Streets of NYC

Photographer Richard Renaldi's 6-year-long project Touching Strangers has been an incredible success. From viral Internet fame to a full-fledged photo book that exceeded its Kickstarter goal eight times over, there's something profoundly moving about complete strangers posed together, sometimes quite intimately, on the streets of NYC.

In the video above we get a behind the scenes look at how Renaldi does what he does, and how his subjects, sometimes reticent at first, often wind up feeling at ease and connected to this perfect stranger they didn't know existed 10 minutes ago.

Portraits of Complete Strangers Touching Each Other

While photographer Richard Renadli was in the midst of his 2003 project, See America By Bus, where he was photographing groupings of strangers waiting in Greyhound bus stations, he began to think about exploring the idea of expanding on his group portraitures of strangers concept.  “To create spontaneous and fleeting relationships between complete strangers,” as he as stated.

Can You Figure Out What’s Strange About These Family Portraits?

Pay a visit to photographer Jamie Diamond's website, and you'll find that one of her projects is a series of family portraits. The images look like standard family portraits: the members are posed in different places and positions, there are older members and younger members; everyone's dressed nicely, everyone's smiling.

Look a little closer though, and you might notice that certain things are a bit strange... or should we say "stranger"?

Photographer Challenges Social Norms by Touching Strangers in New York City

NYC-based photographer Joy Mckinney has spent most of her life conforming to the norms she believed to be "socially correct." Her latest series, The Guardian, is about breaking through those norms and her own socially guarded personality in order to interact with strangers on the streets of New York in a real and meaningful way.

‘Can I Take Your Picture?’: How to Talk to Strangers Without Upsetting Your Mother

Photographing strangers can be a daunting proposition. It was one of the focuses of the workshops I held in NYC this past summer. What if they get mad, what if they yell at me, or what if they go completely psycho on me? Odds are, most people will simply say no pictures. Even the school of Bruce Gilden photographers have hardly been bothered with their “mugging style portrait.”

Woman Photographs Herself Receiving Strange Looks in Public

Memphis-based photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has long been aware of strangers making fun of her behind her back due to her size. So aware, in fact, that she has turned the whole concept into a full-blown photography project. Titled Wait Watchers, the series consists of Morris-Cafiero's self-portraits in public in which strangers can be seen in the background giving her strange looks and/or laughing.

Shooting Studio Portraits of Strangers on the Street As If They Were Famous

Philippe Echaroux is a young French photographer who makes a living shooting portraits of celebrities (among other things). Recently, he carried out a personal project that had been brewing in his mind for some time: using his celebrity portraiture experience and style for spontaneous portraits of ordinary strangers encountered on the street. The short video above shows how Echaroux roamed around with his small team and set up makeshift photo studios for each of the portraits.

Photos of Strangers on a Beach, Captured by the Subjects Themselves

Stranger Tourist Self-Portraits is an experimental photo project by photographer Benoit Paillé that consists of photos of strangers encountered on a beach in Mexico. What's different about the series is that the photographs are captured by the subjects themselves, as evidenced by the remote shutter release cable seen approaching the camera from the strangers' hands.

Non-Candid Photographs of Strangers in Non-Place Places

"Non-lieux," or "non-place," is a term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé in a 1995 book titled, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. It refers to places that lack history and tradition, places that people pass through, places that are solely meant for transactions, places where people are largely anonymous faces, and places that aren't significant enough to be considered "places."

Portraits of Strangers in Cars Illuminated by Off-Camera Lighting

Shooting portraits of strangers in cars isn't uncommon, but have you ever tried using off-camera lighting to illuminate their faces? That's what photographer Jonathan Castillo is doing for his ongoing series called Car Culture.

Castillo, an undergraduate BFA student at CSU Long Beach, shoots candid, artificially-lit photos of people driving around on the roads of Los Angeles. While the photos are captured from a car directly in front of the subjects, Castillo lights the scenes using a second specially-rigged vehicle driving to the side.

Voyeuristic Portraits of New Yorkers Seen Through Apartment Windows

The photographs in photographer Gail Albert Halaban's series Out My Window are unsettling and beautiful at the same time. Each of them shows people framed by open apartment windows in New York City -- quite creepy if the images are actually of unsuspecting strangers. At the same time, the voyeur is quite a photographer, as each shot perfectly balances the lighting of the subject inside with the cityscapes and brick walls outside.

The scenes were actually all staged, and are intended to share something that Halaban says New Yorkers can relate to: "connecting" with neighbors through apartment windows.

Crumpled Faces of Random Strangers

For his project titled "Good Morning!", photographer Levi Mandel shot stealthy photos of unsuspecting strangers, printed out the faces, crumpled them up, and then re-photographed them.

A Photographer Who Throws Herself at Men, Literally

Photographer Lilly McElroy has a unique series of photos titled I Throw Myself At Men that consists of self-portraits showing her launching herself into the arms of strangers.

For this project I went to a lot of bars and I literally threw myself at men who I didn't know. I used my body as a projectile, hurling myself toward strong, vulnerable men who were waiting to catch me. Poised in a perpetual state of social awkwardness and in full possession of the ability to subvert stereotypical gender roles, the photographs pose questions concerning relationships, social connection, sex, gender, and the desire to form relationships quickly that are both intense and long lasting.

The project got started after McElroy placed ads on Craigslist asking for men who'd be willing to meet blind date-style in bars and have McElroy throw herself at them.