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 overcome social anxiety, build confidence, and ease the difficulty I had emotionally processing rejection.

The encounter is everything. 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 of meeting people: of standing in discomfort, becoming aware of the stories we tell ourselves before we ask, and what happens in the space between two people when they connect.

Each attempt, whether or not a portrait was made, became a personal victory over fear and self-doubt. Over time, the practice transformed into emotion-regulation therapy: a way of gradually extending my comfort zone, learning to steady the turbulent emotions that social situations can provoke, and building a gentler, more helpful style of self-talk.

By 2022, learned enough from the practice to know it had value beyond my own experience. The Exposure Therapy workshops grew from that.

The fear involved in photographing people never goes away; you simply improve your ability to work through 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 about 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 goes on, as it began: more practice than project.