This is from nowness.com. It's a segment of an interview between Ryan McGinley and David Armstrong. As someone who also strives for "naturalness" in portraiture, I appreciate Ryan's approach...
DA: Have you ever felt a subject is just doing what they anticipate you’d want?
RM: Sometimes that happens. It ends up being like breaking a horse in order to get them to act natural.
DA: If nothing else works, you can wear them down, shooting so much film that they just give up.
RM: That’s what I feel like a lot of these portraits are: wearing a person down to get them to this place where they’re totally themselves and all sense of self-consciousness has left the room, exhaustion sets in, and you catch them at a moment where they have let their guard down. A lot of these pictures actually are the in-between moments.
DA: So many people, when you pull a camera out, feel like they have to look directly at the lens.
RM: This is actually the first time I’ve had lots of direct eye contact in my photographs. I was always scared of that. But I think in a lot of these images it really works. I wanted the viewer to really feel that they’re engaged with the person. What I always try to achieve is the feeling of that brief look that you share with someone at a restaurant, on line at the supermarket, on the subway––that one second that feels like an eternity, and then it’s over.
