I Photographed Strangers in Algeria for a Year. Here Is What Faces Actually Tell You.

In 2015, I started a project that I was not really qualified to do.

I decided to walk around my home country with a camera, stop ordinary people, ask them to let me photograph them, and ask them to tell me one story. Just one. About anything they wanted. I had no commission. No editor. No publisher. I had no idea what the project was for. I had a camera, a notebook, and a slightly embarrassing amount of nervous energy.

A year later I had a book and I had photographed somewhere over two hundred faces. And about ten years later, I am still trying to write down what I learned, because most of it does not fit cleanly into a sentence.

I want to try anyway. This is for anyone who has ever wanted to photograph people but found themselves too shy, too polite, or too afraid of the moment between asking and clicking. That moment is the entire art form. Almost everything else can be taught.

What people are actually deciding when you ask

The first thing I learned, and I learned it in the first week, is that when you ask a stranger if you can photograph them, they are not deciding what you think they are deciding.

You think they are deciding whether they want to be photographed.

They are not. They are deciding whether you are safe.

Those are two completely different decisions. The second one is finished within roughly four seconds of you opening your mouth, and almost nothing you say after those four seconds will change the answer. They are reading your face, your posture, your distance from them, the speed of your speech, the softness of your eyes, whether you are slightly leaning back or slightly leaning forward, whether your hand is near the camera or away from it. They are doing math you cannot consciously do, and the result of the math is yes or no.

The reason this matters is that most photographers, especially shy ones, spend the four seconds explaining the project. The history of the project. The reason they want this particular shot. The publication they hope it will appear in. The intention behind the work. They think they are persuading. They are doing the opposite. The longer the explanation, the less safe you are.

The photographers who get incredible portraits of strangers are not better salespeople. They are better at being safe in four seconds. There is an enormous difference between those two skills. Almost nobody teaches the second one.

What I eventually learned to do was very simple. Walk up. Smile slowly, not quickly. Make eye contact for slightly less time than feels natural to you. Ask in their language, even badly. Hold the camera down, not up. And then wait. Genuinely wait. Most photographers fill the silence after asking. Do not. The silence is where they decide. If you fill it, you are interrupting the math.

Roughly seven out of ten people will say yes. Two will say no politely. One will say no in a way that suggests you should walk away faster than you walked up. You learn to read which is which. That reading is also part of the art form.

What faces look like when nobody is performing

Here is the thing nobody tells you about photographing strangers. Once they say yes, they will, almost without exception, immediately do something with their face that they think looks like “being photographed.”

The men will square their shoulders. The women will tilt their heads slightly down and to the right. Older people will straighten up. Younger people will smile a smile that has been practiced on phone screens for so long that it no longer reaches the eyes. None of this is good photography. All of it is what you will get if you click the shutter at the moment they expect you to click the shutter.

The trick, which took me about a hundred portraits to learn, is to not click then. Lift the camera. Frame the shot. Wait. Talk to them while you frame. Ask them about their day. Ask them about the bread they are carrying. Ask them about the weather, which everyone will gladly complain about in any language. Do not ask them to smile. Asking someone to smile is a guarantee of a worse photograph.

What you are waiting for is the moment, usually three or four seconds in, where they relax. Where they stop performing for the camera and start being a person who happens to be in front of one. The shoulders soften. The chin tilts back to neutral. The eyes get tired in a way that is not bad tired, just human tired. That is the photograph. Click then.

The reason most amateur portraits look stiff is not lighting. It is not lens. It is not gear. It is that the photographer clicked at the moment the subject was performing, instead of at the moment they had finished performing. Once you know what to wait for, you cannot un-know it. You will see it in every portrait you take, and in every portrait you look at, for the rest of your life.

The story always changes the photograph

I asked everybody for a story. One story. Anything they wanted.

I expected this to be a parallel project. I would take the photo. They would tell the story. I would pair them in the book.

What actually happened was much stranger and much better. The story changed the photograph. Always. Every time. Without exception.

Here is what I mean. I would take a portrait of a man who looked, frankly, hard. Closed face. Tight mouth. The kind of face you do not bother a person about. Then I would ask for a story, and he would, after a long silence, tell me about his daughter who lives in France and only calls on Fridays. And I would lift the camera again, and click again, and the second photograph would be a completely different man, even though only forty seconds had passed. Same shirt. Same street. Same light. Different soul, visible.

I did not know this was a thing about portrait photography until I had done it maybe sixty times. Now I think it is the central thing about portrait photography. A face is not a fixed object. A face is a layered thing, and what layer you get to photograph depends entirely on what conversation you had in the thirty seconds before the click.

If you ask people about their job, you photograph their job face. If you ask them about their mother, you photograph the face of a person who has a mother. If you ask them about a fear, very gently, with permission, you sometimes get a photograph that you will not be able to look at for a year because it will feel like you stole something.

The reason most portrait photography is boring is that the conversation underneath it is boring. The reason most portrait photography is great is the same reason in reverse.

The photographs I will not show

I want to tell you something that I do not usually talk about, because it is the part of the project that I am still uncertain about, ten years later.

There are photographs from that year that have never been shown anywhere. Not in the book. Not online. Not to friends. They sit on a hard drive in a folder that I have not opened in a long time. Not because they are bad. Because they are too good. Or rather, because the people in them were too generous with me, and I am not sure I have earned the right to show that generosity to other people.

A woman in her seventies told me about a son she had lost. I took her photograph after she told me. It is one of the best photographs I have ever taken in my life. I will probably never publish it.

I bring this up because I think there is a thing they do not teach you in photography school, or anywhere else. The fact that you can take a photograph does not mean you should show it. The contract between a stranger and a camera is much more delicate than the contract between you and your own eyes, and if you are going to do this kind of work seriously, you have to develop a sense for which photographs are yours to share and which are simply yours to have witnessed.

Most photographers do not develop that sense. The internet rewards them for not developing it. I am not going to tell you what to do with your own work. I am going to tell you that the photographers I respect most, in this lane, all have a folder like mine. They know which folder is which. The folder you do not show is, weirdly, the one that turns you into a real photographer. Because keeping it closed is a daily exercise in remembering that the work is about the people, not about you.

What I would tell anyone starting now

If you are thinking about doing a project like this, in any country, with any culture, with any camera, here is everything I wish somebody had told me in 2015.

Pick a small place first. Not a country. Not a city. A neighborhood. One that you can walk in five times in a week without anyone calling the police. Familiarity is half of the access. The first ten people will be hard. By the fortieth, the cafe owner will know you, and he will introduce you to people, and the project will start running itself.

Carry less gear than you think you need. A small camera. One lens. A notebook. A pen that works. That is the kit. The bigger your gear, the smaller your access. There is an inverse relationship between the size of your camera and the size of the truth you will be allowed to photograph.

Listen more than you shoot. The ratio I eventually settled on was something like ten minutes of listening for every two photographs taken. Most beginners reverse this. The reversal is why their portraits look hollow.

Print the work. Not a book, necessarily. Just prints. Hand them to the people you photographed when you see them again. Almost no photographer does this anymore. It is the single most important thing you can do. The next person they refer you to is worth fifty cold approaches.

Do not do it for the social media. Do it for the hard drive. Do it for the future version of you who will, twenty years from now, sit down with a glass of something, open the folder, and remember that on a Tuesday in March in 2025 you stopped a man on a bridge and he told you about his brother and you took a photograph that made you a slightly better human for the rest of your life.

That is the part of the work nobody can take from you. That is the part the camera was actually for.

The book is just the receipt.