It is fun and also instructive to imitate the style of a different type of photographer — in this case Garry Winogrand, a prolific artist who died with many rolls of film unprocessed plus several hundred thousand pictures developed but unedited, and still he passed on to us an extensive body of finished work. He shot mostly in monochrome, improvising with a 28mm lens and moving — observers report — with astonishing quickness. He did not always compose carefully or level his camera, and did not fret excessively about image quality. Almost every frame he shot was a failure, according to his own testimony.

I made the image above in the Al-Agamy district of Alexandria, Egypt. The man is a one-chair barber with no customers, keeping his shop open late in the evening. Mr. Winogrand functioned mainly in his own culture, and so could operate openly but anonymously. This was impossible for me (a descendant of Northern Europeans) to implement in an Arab city. Street work there requires a different kind of ingenuity. In Al-Agamy I photographed with my camera on a strap over my shoulder, a wired shutter release snaked through my clothes to my opposite hand, used auto-focus, and composed using mental visualization without looking directly at my subject.

Below is a wider view of the same alley where our newspaper-reading barber has his business — again using the Winogrand sensibility.