I didn’t start my self-portrait project to become a more empathetic person.
I started it because winter showed up in Toronto like a bouncer at the door of my life, arms crossed, saying: “Not today.” When it’s brutally cold, and the city feels hostile, the usual “just go walk and shoot” answer stops working. So I did what I’ve been trying to do more of lately: adapt instead of pause.
The plan was simple. Use self-portraits as a portrait school. Control the variables. Practice lighting. Practice expression. Practice finishing. Treat it like reps in the gym, but for portraits. (If you’ve read my post on Winter Can’t Stop the Work: Using Self-Portraits to Learn Portrait Photography, you know the exact headspace I was in.)
Then something unexpected happened.
Somewhere between the tripod, the timer, and the hundred little decisions that go into making a portrait… I started feeling more empathy. Not the abstract, motivational-poster kind. The practical kind. The kind that changes how you speak to someone when they’re standing in front of your lens.
And it caught me off guard.
The subject seat is a different world
If you’ve photographed people—really photographed people—you already know the weird truth:
The photographer has power.
Not “evil power.” Just… control. You’re choosing the frame. You’re choosing the moment. You’re choosing what gets shown and what gets cut off at the edges. You’re the one saying “chin up,” “turn slightly,” “hold that,” “one more.”
But when you step into the subject seat, even in your own living room, you feel the other side of it immediately.
- You feel how self-conscious it can be.
- You feel how long “just hold that expression” actually feels.
- You feel how quickly your face stops feeling like a face and starts feeling like a problem you’re trying to solve.
That experience alone is a teacher.
And that’s where empathy starts to sneak in—because empathy isn’t just “being nice.” It’s the ability to recognize and understand what someone else might be feeling, even when they’re not saying it out loud.
Self-portraits force you to live inside that.
Seeing yourself clearly changes how you see everyone else
One of the strongest ideas I pulled from The Good Trade piece is the moment of recognition—the first time you see yourself in a photograph and feel compassion instead of critique. That “oh… that’s me” moment, paired with self-kindness.
That hit home for me, because self-portraits don’t let you hide behind the usual distractions:
- New location.
- Great sunset.
- Interesting stranger.
- Busy street.
Nope. It’s just you. In a frame. With nowhere to run.
And the strange thing is: the more you practice seeing yourself with a little softness, the harder it becomes to photograph other people with coldness.
You start to recognize the same human stuff in them that you’ve been wrestling with in yourself:
- Tension.
- Guardedness.
- The “what do I do with my hands?” panic.
- The desire to look like someone they wish they were, instead of who they are right now.
You don’t judge it as much because you’ve been there.
A self-portrait isn’t just a face
The AndanaFoto article reframed something for me in a way that stuck: a self-portrait doesn’t have to be your face—or even your body. It can be a way to visually explore identity, emotion, and personal narrative.
That matters, because it shifts the whole project away from “How do I look?” and toward “What am I expressing?”
And that shift is the difference between a selfie-world habit and a self-portrait practice.
It’s also why I keep coming back to this idea I wrote about in Selfies vs. Self-Portraits: What’s the Real Difference?—that self-portraits are slower, more intentional, and more about revealing something than performing something.
When you treat self-portraiture as expression, not proof-of-life, you start learning a language that applies to everyone you photograph.
Because every portrait session—street or studio—is really a translation problem:
How do I translate a person’s inner state into an image, without flattening them?
Empathy is a portrait skill (not a personality trait)
I read this academic paper on portraits, emotions, and the development of emotional intelligence through art—especially the idea that art-making can support self-knowledge and improve communication and interaction with others.
That’s the connective tissue I didn’t expect to feel so directly in my own practice.
Because when you do self-portraits seriously, you’re training a bunch of emotional skills alongside the technical ones:
- Self-awareness: noticing what you’re actually feeling before you try to “pose a feeling.”
- Self-regulation: calming the frustration when the light is wrong for the 18th time.
- Empathy: understanding that the person in front of your camera might be feeling exactly what you felt yesterday—awkward, exposed, unsure, trying.
So yeah—empathy is not just “who you are.”
It’s something you can practice.
And apparently, I’ve been practicing it by accident.
How will this change my portraits of other people?
Here’s what I’ve noticed already, even before I take this back outside into street portraits and environmental work:
I’m more patient.
I’m more aware of how intense silence feels when someone is being watched.
I’m more careful with direction—less “do this,” more “try this if it feels natural.”
And I’m more tuned to the micro-signals:
- When someone’s smile is a shield.
- When someone’s posture is saying, “I don’t trust this yet.”
- When someone relaxes for half a second, and that’s the frame.
Self-portraits don’t just teach you lighting.
They teach you what it feels like to be seen.
And once you understand that from the inside, it becomes harder to treat a subject like a prop.
A simple empathy drill (that also improves your portraits)
If you want to build this into your own practice (and I’m writing this as much for myself as anyone else), try this:
- Make a self-portrait where your only goal is honesty. Not “good.” Not “cool.” Honest.
- Make a second self-portrait where you’re trying to look like you’ve got it all together.
- Compare them. Ask: Which one feels more human? Which one feels more familiar?
- Now carry that awareness into your next portrait session with someone else.
Because the person you’re photographing is probably doing some version of that same split inside themselves.
The real work is making space for the honest version to show up.
The surprise takeaway
I went into this thinking self-portraits were a winter workaround—a way to stay productive while the city tries to freeze me into a statue.
But it’s turning into something else.
Self-portraits are teaching me empathy in a way that reading about empathy never could: by making me feel the subject’s seat, over and over again.
And I’m starting to believe this might be one of the most transferable skills I can build for the work I actually care about—portraits of other people, in real environments, with real lives behind their eyes.
Winter can do what it wants.
I’ll be inside, learning how to see people better.