The Morning Report
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No matter where I am in the county, someone is always hamming it up for the camera.
So it didn’t surprise me when I pointed my lens at this pickup truck in the Tijuana River Valley and immediately had the men on the truck waving and posing for the camera.
It’s truly the opposite of what I hope to achieve. On almost every assignment I go to (except, of course, for portraits), I explain to the subject that I don’t want them to pose, I don’t want them to change anything they would normally doing, I just want them to behave normally.
The challenge of capturing people behaving natural in their everyday environments is one that every photojournalist must overcome on a daily basis. And every journalist develops his or her own techniques for how to make people comfortable.
But sometimes, you just don’t have the time or the opportunity to ask people to behave naturally. This time, the truck filled with workers drove past me and from the moment I pointed my lens at them, the man in the right of the frame was gesturing at me.
— SAM HODGSON