A Fear of People

In 2018, I gave myself a simple and uncomfortable assignment: approach at least one stranger a day and ask to photograph them. I committed to this for a year. It began as a private experiment, born of a desire to challenge my fears about others and how we move through public space, but it became something I hadn't anticipated: a practice that helped me with social anxiety, confidence, and the difficulty I had emotionally processing rejection.

The encounter is the focal point. The photograph is a souvenir.

What I was looking for wasn't a project with an outcome. It was a practice focused on the process itself: on the standing at the edge of the discomfort, on the stories we tell ourselves before we ask, on what happens in the space between two people when one of them is frightened and goes anyway. Each attempt, whether the portrait happened or not, was a personal victory over fear and self-doubt. Over time, the practice became a form of self-therapy: a way of gradually extending the comfort zone, regulating the emotions that social situations provoke, and building a kinder, steadier relationship with myself.

By 2022, I had learned enough from the practice to know it had value beyond my own experience. I had also encountered the same fear in photographer after photographer, and I wanted to find out whether I could help. The Exposure Therapy workshops grew from that. The fear involved in photographing people never goes away; you simply improve your ability to work with it and, in doing so, reduce the noise that distracts from the image, the person in front of you, and from yourself. The workshops are built on that principle. They use street portraiture as a relational practice, a way of learning presence, courage, and self-regulation through repeated, supported encounter with strangers. The skills, as participants consistently find, carry well beyond photography.

The series continues. It remains, as it began, more practice than project.