Environmental portraits are often quite interpretive. They do more than just portray the likeness of person. They can instead tell us who that person is, and what he or she does. When I am considering making an environmental portrait, I look first for any symbolic values in the setting that I can use to enrich the context (also called the “environment”) that we bring to our subject. While walking through Sucre’s Central Market, I came to an area featuring recycled woven fiber baskets piled from floor to ceiling. Various vendors had set up their fruit stalls in front of these baskets. Such baskets can symbolize the essence of a marketplace, and here they provide the entire background layer for this image. This fruit vendor is also completely surrounded by the things she sells. She wears the costume of a vendor. Her response is neutral, which is critical to my interpretation. If she was grinning at my camera (most portraits often feature smiling people posing for a picture) it would just be another picture of someone having her picture taken. Interpretive photography can offer much more than that. By remaining emotionally neutral, she is saying to us that the camera is symbolically invisible to her. Her body language remains pensive and anticipatory. She wears a plastic bag over one hand so she can safely dispense the fruit to her customers. She holds her head off to one side, as if to tell us that she may also be a bit on the tired side. She has a business to run here, and the amply filled environment tells us that it is a multi-faceted business. This interpretive environmental portrait was among the most expressive images I made in Bolivia. It takes the measure of not only the person, but also the task.