“Your job as a writer is to imagine yourself into the lives of people who are not you . . . and, that way, provide a gateway for readers to also imagine themselves into the lives of others so that we can build up a community of shared understanding.”
—Caryl Phillips

I think this is what good documentary and portrait photography is doing too. You have to meet the subject as they are, without preconception or categorisation, so that your picture becomes a door into their world. The focus is on what makes them individual, rather than using them to illustrate a universal.

H/t Russell Davies