My Favorite Portrait

I spent a couple of months visiting India in 1990 and although I usually don't take a lot of portraits, there were so many memorable faces everywhere I traveled it was hard not to take at least a few. This was particularly true in Rajasthan, the colorful northwestern desert region of the country which borders Pakistan. 

A few days after arriving in the holy city of Pushkar, I was having a drink in the courtyard of a hotel when I spotted a very tall and dignified looking gentleman whose appearance was so striking I immediately approached him to ask if I could take his portrait. Unfortunately he didn’t speak English and my attempt at communicating using sign language wasn’t getting me anywhere. But just as I was about to give up and leave, a young woman, who as it turned out was his granddaughter, arrived. She spoke English and when I explained I was interested in taking his photo and would send him a print when I returned home, she asked him to pose for me. After some back and forth between them he reluctantly agreed to let me take a single picture. With no margin for error I crossed my fingers hoping he wouldn’t blink. (I’ve since learned a trick to reduce the odds of this happening. When taking portraits, especially when it’s a large group, have everyone close their eyes for a few seconds then as soon as they open them back up, start firing away). 

Later that year, after eighteen months on the road I was back home in Texas and was finally able to review all my slides. Of the fifteen-hundred pictures I’d taken, this portrait was by far my favorite one from my trip. I didn’t notice it at the time but a little bit of light caught one of his eyebrows, adding just a little something extra to the image. A few weeks later, as promised, I dropped a large print of it in the mail. I don’t know if it was ever received, but like to think his portrait is framed and hanging on a wall somewhere as a nice memento for his family.

The photograph was taken with my old Canon AE-1 camera using 35mm Kodachrome slide film, and I recently had it converted to a high resolution digital image and cleaned it up a bit using some new photo editing tools I have access to. You can tell the quality is not as good as the digital images I shoot nowadays, but it’s still a sentimental favorite of mine and was the winning submission in a photography magazine contest the year after I returned.