Portrait Time

It's difficult to take someone's portrait.
It's difficult to take someone's portrait well, and to capture an honest action or emotion in someone--someone you know or do not know.
This is doubly the case when you're obligated to ask, first, whether you can take the person's photograph and use it for a project for your visual anthropology class. But this is, after all, Japan, the land of point-and-shoot-shoot-shoot.

This is Hiromi. Though slightly embarrassed about being photographed in her very new haircut ("I look like a mushroom!" she protested), she readily agreed to have her picture taken, largely due to the fact, I believe, that she was my RA while I stayed in the seminar houses for the first week in Japan. In Hiromi's case, she's a person with whom I've lolled about in pajamas at "home": we're comfortable. For that reason, I think I was able to take just, "a picture of Hiromi," as opposed to a self-concious peace sign held close to the face. It's just Hiromi...who doesn't look like a mushroom.

My only other strategy for taking a semi-candid or at least natural shot of someone here is, to be honest, simply to take a photo while they're not paying attention. (This is true, of course, just in regards to my friends, whose approval I've earlier received, and whose pictures I can erase at their request without any conflict) While it's perhaps a bit difficult to achieve eye contact in such a situation, the resulting photographs still feel somehow more honest to me, as in this (albeit poorly framed and quickly taken) photo of my friend Eriko at her saxophone lesson:

(Contrary to the suggestion of her expression of concentration, the tune was "Dancing Queen.") It may be difficult to call this particular picture a "portrait," but I would call it a portrait of Eriko very involved in doing something she loves. In a country awash in cameras, and the prospect of having one's picture taken produces a series of poses and set expressions many times practiced, a candid shot, I feel, is an important thing indeed.