Dramatic landscapes often define travel photography, but the longer we spend in a place, the clearer it becomes that people are what shape the places we visit. While beautiful, natural formations can take our breath away, the way a community engages with the space they inhabit tells us the intimate stories of a place.
Over the years, I’ve found that taking the time to understand the culture of the places I visit, in addition to experiencing the landscapes and wildlife, allows me to capture meaningful photographs that truly deepen my understanding of a place and its culture.
Photographing people and culture can feel uncomfortable or intimidating for many photographers, and the first step towards exploring cultural photography is accepting and getting comfortable with the fact that you’ll never be invisible – that’s the magic! When you photograph people, your presence is part of the scene, and that’s not a disadvantage. Often, photographers fear influencing the scene or are intimidated to be part of the story. Instead, I urge you to consider how cultural photography can actually open you up to the lived experience of a place in a completely different way, allowing you to understand not just how a place looks, but how it’s lived.
Photographing People in Public Spaces
As a starting point, photographing in streets or public spaces offers a sense of anonymity that can make it a more accessible entry point. Fortunately, landscape and street photography have more in common than they’re often given credit for. In both, the work begins long before anything happens. Much like arriving at a landscape to capture the mountains at sunset and spending time reading the light, the weather, and the shape of the land, photographing in public spaces requires the same patience and awareness. What enables this approach to work, especially in unfamiliar settings, is thorough preparation and a deep understanding of the context of the place you’re visiting.
Preparing before you pick up the camera
Let’s take the example of photographing markets, something we often do in our Morocco, Northern Vietnam, or Oman workshops. The work begins before we ever set foot in the market—with context. We work extensively to find the right local guides, who help guests prepare by explaining how the market functions, what’s traded, who’s who, and where it makes sense to spend time. They answer questions, flag sensitivities, and help us understand what’s normal and what’s not, so we arrive informed rather than reactive. That understanding changes how you see a scene unfold in front of you.
Photographing markets
The challenge in street photography in this environment isn’t finding authentic local interactions, but understanding how to capture moments before they pass. Markets are built around work, trade, and constant motion. Nothing exists in isolation. Tasks overlap, conversations occur in the midst of action, and transactions take place without slowing anything down. My approach in these settings typically begins with the environment, rather than the people. I’ll find a composition within the structures of the space, doorways, ledges, walls, repeating shapes, and then wait. Light shifts, people move, and interactions naturally fall into place. The best photographs aren’t made by chasing moments; instead, they are created by being in the right place with the proper context, and allowing life, much like the weather in the mountains, to unfold on its own terms in front of you.
Photographing interactions rather than individuals
Once you have identified your composition, a common mistake is to focus too narrowly on individuals. This is challenging because you rarely have the opportunity to build a meaningful one-on-one relationship with your subject in street photography. Instead, lean into the action of the scene. Markets are about interaction rather than individual expression, and zooming out to include context almost always brings more clarity to your images. Hands passing goods, money changing hands, bodies leaning toward one another, or brief exchanges between workers tend to read more clearly and feel more timeless than isolated portraits. These gestures sit at the core of trade and are true across cultural contexts, and they haven’t changed much over generations.
Using composition and patience to capture authentic moments
After finding the composition, your time then becomes an exercise in reading the flow of a place. It’s about recognizing which gestures matter, determining which relationships define the moment, and how trade, labor, and environment intersect. Patience matters as much as timing in these chaotic streets, and great images come not from simplifying the scene too much, but from understanding how all the pieces align.
Environmental Portraits and Photographing People in Their Own Space
I spent years working as a photojournalist, often with vulnerable communities experiencing some of the most challenging moments of their lives. This experience reinforced for me the responsibility that comes with photographing people in spaces that hold deep personal meaning. The way people carry themselves and move through their environment isn’t an aesthetic choice, but an expression of culture, identity, and belonging.
When you are invited to photograph in people’s private spaces (their homes, places of worship, or the land they depend on), you work with what’s available. Light is limited, space can be tight, and every object in the frame carries weight. Photographing people in their space requires their trust and your care. Your access is earned, not assumed, and images are shaped through conversation and collaboration, with the awareness from you that the person in front of the camera should recognize themselves in the photograph.
Building trust before taking photographs
Given this level of intimacy, trust has to come first. That begins before a camera is ever raised, with our local guides providing context and clearly explaining the purpose of our visit. Expectations are set on both sides, including how people can communicate if they feel uncomfortable or no longer wish to be photographed.
Why photographing daily life builds better portraits
Taking someone’s portrait is often the most raw and uncomfortable part of the process, for both photographer and subject, and it rarely works if rushed. After a cup of tea together (I’m British!), I usually begin by photographing daily life as it unfolds, observing and asking questions along the way. This eases people into the process and removes pressure from the camera. It might mean watching Maasai release their cattle in the early morning light, or spending time around a stable in the Camargue as horses are led out and work begins. These moments not only make for great documentary-style images of authentic activities, but by the time a portrait becomes part of the conversation, the camera already feels familiar and less intrusive.
Creating respectful and dignified portraits
In personal spaces, how you photograph is inseparable from the photograph itself, because you’re part of the scene. Perspective matters. Looking down on someone with eye contact can feel diminishing, even when unintentional. Lowering yourself to eye level, or slightly below, often creates a greater sense of equality.
Once trust is established, portraiture can follow more naturally. For photographers used to landscapes or wildlife, this intimacy can feel uncomfortable but as Steve McCurry once said, “If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.” While that idea has often been misapplied, the underlying point still holds: patience matters.
Posing a person with dignity starts with intent. A portrait should give someone presence; how we ask a person to stand, where we place them in the frame, and what we choose to include or leave out all shape how they’re seen.
Why perspective and body language matter
Minor adjustments in body language can also shift the tone of a portrait. For example, asking someone to lift their gaze slightly can introduce a sense of pride, while asking someone to lean in can indicate they are engaged. Eye contact should be a choice, not a default. Some people meet the camera confidently, while others feel more themselves looking slightly away, and both are valid. A child staring forlornly into the lens can communicate many things, and not all of them are fair. A considered portrait should lend dignity, while an unthinking image can quickly reduce someone to a stereotype.
What nature photographers can learn from portrait photography
For a nature photographer, portrait photography requires a very different set of skills than those we use in the field. It’s not something we can practise while watching bears in Katmai or waiting for the night sky to clear in White Pocket. Photographing people requires communication and awareness in ways that the natural world never does. From the eagle hunters of Kyrgyzstan to pastoral communities living alongside wildlife in Kenya, spending time with the people who inhabit and work within these environments adds depth to our understanding of the places we visit. These interactions shift our focus from scenery alone to lived experience, reminding us that places we visit are shaped not only by nature but also by the people who call those places home.
When Is It Appropriate to Influence a Scene?
As photographers, we are always balancing the impact of our intervention with the quality of the photograph. In wildlife photography, this often comes in the form of hides, such as watering holes on safaris or bird hides in the United States, where we can create unnatural access and perspective that allow for unique photographs.
Rather than trying to disappear or just accepting a situation as it is, it’s more honest to acknowledge your presence and use it wisely. That means paying attention and making considered decisions that support the moments you’re trying to photograph, rather than distort them.
Ethical intervention in travel photography
In Oman, while scouting the Castles, Canyons, and Dunes of Oman workshop, I arrived at the Wahiba Dune Field to photograph Bedouin herders and quickly realized I was facing a major challenge: the camp sat low in a trough between dunes, where the light was flat and the horizon was cluttered. Since my focus was capturing the organic interactions between the Bedouin and their camels, I led my hosts up to a higher vantage point along the dunes, where the horizon was clear, and the sunset light was beautiful. Moving together to higher ground wasn’t about directing behaviour or changing the story, but about placing the moment in a setting where impactful photographs were more possible in the limited time I had.
Knowing when to step back and let moments unfold
Once we reached higher ground, my role changed. The work shifted from making decisions to stepping back and observing. The group settled quickly, talking among themselves and tending to the camels just as they were at the camp down below. Nothing was repeated or performed. By making a small intervention early on and choosing a location that enhanced the situation instead of distracting from it, I could let the interpersonal moments unfold without further interference.
Across all types of photography, that balance is often where the strongest images come from, not from avoiding involvement altogether, but from knowing when your intervention is valuable and when it’s time to step aside.
Join Luke Dray to learn how to photograph people and cultures on our 01/27 Castles, Canyons, and Dunes of Oman, 02/27 Kenya’s Tribes, and 09/27 Northern Vietnam workshops.
This article was originally published in our 2026/2027 Photography Destinations Magazine. To read more articles from our team of pros, request your free copy here.
