The beginning of photographing strangers
6 years ago I photographed a couple of random people on the street to try to build a portfolio. Fast forward and it’s taken me on endless adventures photographing strangers all over the world. Thailand, Peru, Brazil, Myanmar, and the United States. Now I even have a portrait photography business in Miami. Ever since I started I got fixated on the number 1000, today I finally did it, 1000 Pictures of strangers.
I made a nice colorful chart to show off some of the highlights of interactions.
The Highlights with Strangers
The mean interactions:
Rude rejection: Mostly the rejections were nice and polite, some of them didn’t understand the languages I spoke (in Thailand and Myanmar), some were busy, some thought it was a strange request, but overall everyone was lovely except for a couple of guys that weren’t quite as nice. I have some footage, but ill leave it out to respect their privacy.
Water thrown at me: I was photographing a group of teens and one of the girls threw water at a stranger’s car for looking at her? Logically the car was right behind me and splashed me. The guy I was photographing apologized, but I just left asap after getting his IG to send him the pics.
Hit by bike: while photographing someone recognized me from a video and when turning around I got hit a little, by a motorcycle, it dented my lens, but overall I felt fine.
The super nice interactions
Offered to hire me: 14 individuals suggested we met again as a paid shoot, out of those only 3 followed through and 1 didn’t pay me.
Money offered by strangers:
Although I never did this for money (I did it for the power) a good amount of people offered to pay me. This mostly happened when I told around 200 strangers that I did accept tips. There also was a period where I gave 3 free pics and charged around 15 for the rest. That only lasted a week as it felt a bit weird and one person got really mad at me even after sending them all the pics :].
During the shoots 4 people offered money, I politely rejected and 3 people insisted, out of those offered I got $10, $10 and someone gave me $100! I was so surprised when I saw it in my pocket. The guy I rejected was $5.
How asking strangers looks like. Here’s a video of what an average day looks like taking pics of strangers. On my best days, I’ll photograph around 40ish people, and on bad days sometimes only around 6.
The pictures: there are a few that got lost due to poor storage management and around 150 that got lost because of a drive being dropped and corrupted :(, but here are the pictures.
here are some of the pics but a bit bigger so you don’t need a magnifying glass
Thank you so much for reading, my next goal is 10,000 strangers and I have no idea how I will make that collage, because my computer almost died making the 1000 strangers collage. Hopefully, I’ll have a high-tech space computer by then. Thanks for following the journey :].
Come to Mumbai Bro