My father was a dentist, and my mother gave up her profession as a teacher when I was born. This event, so important for me, happened on May 2, 1906, in Riga, Latvia.

Riga was a highly civilized old city of 300,000 inhabitants. It had museums, an opera, three repertory theaters, and a ballet. It was in Riga that the philosopher Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason.

I had only one sister, Liouba, a few years younger than I, and we were very close. Our summer vacations were spent with our parents in Europe. Before I was eighteen, thanks to these travels, I was familiar with most of the important museums in Europe – where I was particularly affected by the portraits.

I caught the photography virus at the age of fifteen, when I discovered an old view-camera in our attic. My father had acquired the camera to use in his spare time, but had eventually stored it away. With my allowance money I bought myself a book which explained that I had to buy glass plates because at that time there was no film being used in Europe. I bought a dozen and photographed my sister near the window. I developed the first plate in our bathroom by the light of a ruby-red bulb. It was one of the most magical moments of my life. In the dim red light I watched, wide-eyed, a miracle: the gradual appearance of dark outlines on the milky surface of my plate – forming the first photographic image I had ever taken.

From then on, most of my pocket money went into my new hobby. I became the family photographer. On our trips it was I who took the usual kind of travel photos. But mostly I photographed my friends, my girlfriends, and the girlfriends of my friends. It was their faces that I tried to portray. Now, thinking back, I find it symptomatic. This fascination with the human face has never left me. Every face I see seems to hide – and sometimes fleetingly to reveal – the mystery of another human being. Later, capturing this revelation became the goal and the passion of my life. I became a collector of the reflections of the innermost self of the people who faced my camera.

I led a protected life. In Riga, school pupils were simultaneously taught five languages: Lettish, Russian, German, French, and Latin. I was at the head of the class and also its president in the last three school years. My father wanted me to study medicine, but I thought that electrical engineering was the great profession of the future. At eighteen I had finished school and went to study engineering in Dresden, Germany.

A couple of years later, my sister, who had gone to Paris to study art, fell in love with a young Frenchman. I went to their wedding in Paris. At that time, this vibrant city was indisputably the world capital of the arts, and it made such an impression on me that I decided to continue my studies there.

I was more interested in art and literature than my fellow students were. In comparison, mechanics and technique seemed dry to me. I had successfully passed my exams, but unlike most of my colleagues I could not repair a motor or a watch. More and more my thoughts turned to photography. I felt the urge to take pictures, to experiment, to create. Photography seemed to me still unexplored, an art at the very beginning of its growth.

Since I considered the human face the most interesting subject to photograph, I hoped I could explore it the way my favorite writers, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, had explored human nature, with psychological depth and honesty. I looked at photographs which were then fashionable in Paris and I did not like them. They were diffused, pretentious and arty. I saw myself fighting this trend. I wanted to show that photography could be realistic, strong, simple, and very sharp. And I decided there was a place for me. I announced to my mother my decision to abandon my studies and become a photographer. This made her very unhappy. My professor of mathematics told me, “Halsman, in a few months you can have your engineering degree and you want to become…a photographer!”