Cape On, Guard Down: Making Portraits in the Barbershop Chair
Photo: Thomas Martin Easterly, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve made portraits of men in living rooms, on job sites, in church parking lots, and once in a Home Depot garden center because the light was good and the guy was already holding a bag of mulch. The hardest room is always the one with a camera in it. Men who don’t like having their picture taken don’t relax because you ask them to. They relax when they forget you’re there. That’s why I spent four Saturdays in October at a barbershop on the east side of town, shooting between haircuts.
The Chair Does Half the Work
A barbershop is not a studio. That’s the whole point. The floors are covered in hair, the mirrors are smudged, and the air smells like talc and aftershave and somebody’s lunch. Men walk in for a trim, not a portrait. They sit down because they have to. And that obligation — the simple fact of being in the chair — is the best gift a photographer can get.
The first guy I photographed was a retired school bus driver named Ray. He told me he hadn’t had a photo taken since his daughter’s wedding in 2019, and he’d spent most of that day hiding behind a potted plant. When I asked if I could make a few frames while he got his usual, he shrugged. “Long as you don’t make me smile.”
I didn’t. I made forty frames of Ray looking at himself in the mirror, looking at his hands, looking at nothing at all. The one I printed is the one where he’s watching the barber work, chin lifted, eyes half-closed. He looks like a man who has been in that chair a thousand times and never once thought about how he looked in it. That’s the picture.
Mirrors Are Not the Enemy
Most people think a mirror is a problem in a portrait. It’s not. A mirror gives the subject somewhere to look that isn’t the lens. It turns the camera into a witness instead of a demand. I spent a lot of time shooting reflections — the back of a head, the edge of a jaw, a pair of hands folded over the armrest. The barber’s hands and the customer’s hands tell you more about a man than his smile ever will.
There’s also something honest about a mirror in a barbershop. It’s not a vanity mirror. It’s a working mirror. Men look into it to check the cut, not to admire themselves. That kind of looking is unguarded. I’ll take it over a posed headshot every time.
The Ritual Is the Icebreaker
By the time a man is in the chair, the hard part is over. He’s already sitting still. He’s already committed to twenty minutes of not going anywhere. The hot towel, the clippers, the brush at the neck — it’s a routine he knows. Routine makes people forget to perform.
I learned to ask about the haircut, not the smile. “What number on the sides?” “You getting the same as always?” “How long have you been coming here?” Those questions don’t require a personality. They just require an answer. And once a man starts answering, he stops thinking about the camera.
Teasing Is a Love Language
The barbers in this shop have known each other for years. The banter is relentless. They rib each other about golf games, bad dates, the Cowboys, whose turn it is to sweep. The customers get pulled in. I stayed quiet and shot through it. The best frames came when a guy was mid-laugh at his own expense, or rolling his eyes at the barber’s joke, or giving the guy in the next chair a look that said, Can you believe this?
Men who hate having their picture taken usually hate it because they don’t know what to do with their face. In a barbershop, they don’t have to do anything with it. They just have to be there. The teasing takes care of the rest.
What I Actually Photograph
I photograph the cape. I photograph the neck. I photograph the way a man’s shoulders drop when the clippers turn off. I photograph the little sigh after the cape comes off and the brush goes on. I photograph hands — resting, fidgeting, holding a phone, holding a coffee. I photograph the look a man gives himself in the mirror when he thinks no one is watching.
None of that is a pose. All of it is a portrait.
The last session was a kid named Marcus, twenty-three, who told me he hated every photo of himself he’d ever seen. He sat down, got his fade, and spent the whole time talking about his new job. I shot maybe sixty frames. When I brought the print by a week later, he looked at it for a long time and said, “That’s me. That’s actually me.”
That’s the whole job. The barbershop didn’t make him photogenic. It just gave him a room where he could stop dodging the camera long enough to be seen. If you’re a man who hates having his picture taken, find a barber you trust. Bring a photographer. Sit down. Let the chair do the work.
