This will vary from person to person and everyone has their own story of woe, be it a school photo coinciding with a bout of pimples or chronic bad hair month. I think there are individual triggers and then more general societal issues. 

In my last blog, I talked about why I think photography is still pressurised as a hangover from the days of film, but we have a new set of challenges to add to the old ones. I think whilst we are probably being photographed more, in part what we are contending with now is comparison culture. It’s not the average human judged against the average human or the type of people that we are likely to meet in our neighbourhood, it's a comparison of a filtered and curated social media from most of the world. It filters out much of what is normal and leaves us with a skewed expectation as we dismiss things that we know are very good because we've been bombarded with extremes of “perfection”. For me, the idea of perfection is enlivening at first but ultimately hollow. It leaves me cold in comparison to the things that make me really feel comfort. Perfection or sophistication comes at the expense of our simple humanness.

I think it’s a shame that we have barriers around an opportunity to share our character and there is a great deal of resistance for people to open up in front of a camera. The truth is that a real and open expression holds a joy that is contagious and it has nothing to do with beauty, it’s our universal language. A great smile is a great smile, no matter who’s wearing it. It’s an energy. An unguarded expression is communication at its finest. After all, expression is the term to describe how we share our feelings. At its core, this is one of the main reasons photography is so special. We can capture and hold that moment and that openness in a photograph! 

Asking an actor to generate an expression should yield a very plausible facsimile of that emotion, but give that instruction to regular folk and they will probably just look like they are pulling a weird face. The same is true when you ask people to “smile for the camera”. You are asking them to act. Those not trained in generating an emotional trigger will more than likely make a wooden attempt. I found early on that photographs work when a response is captured rather than attempting to generate a performance. After the shoot, nobody will know what the person is smiling about and nobody needs to see the 10 photographs on either side of the one that gets chosen. 

My visible purpose in a commercial photo shoot is to entertain and relax everyone in the room, and that starts with my hellos as I enter the building. My underlying and less visible purpose is to lock down all of the technical aspects of the shoot, lighting, exposure etc. My aim when photographing people is to hide the process through simple distraction. There is a camera in between us, and more than likely studio lights and a reflector so no one is going to be truly fooled by the fact that I’m making out that there is nothing going on, so my process is to normalise it. The energy I permit in the space will be evident in the photographs I take.  

The situation needs to appear to be status-neutral and it must appear that we are all equals in this environment. The truth is that I have a job to do and will be very subtly controlling the process. It's important that I don’t offer a lower status to the CEO of an organisation. Their career is based on solution-driven leadership and in this situation I am the best-equipped person in the room to run the shoot. I can’t offer a superior status because nobody is going to feel comfortable if I make them feel inferior.

It’s about holding a safe space through massive respect and lots of care to listen and then respond to each person in front of me. The more that people feel heard, the more relaxed they become. If I can manage to bring people to the point of cooperation the experience becomes easy and natural expressions become possible. I have been doing this a a very long time and I can count on one hand the number of people who I could not sway to relax enough to smile to be photographed. Many of the most tentative people I have photographed have come away saying that once they felt safe enough to relax into it, they actually had fun.

I aim to create a joyous window within the day of the person being photographed. For me it’s not about the job, it’s about the shared experience. If that is smooth everything else falls into place.