For two days in July, hundreds of people who live or work in Yountville took turns ducking into a photo booth in front of the community hall. Alone, in pairs, with pets or in family groups, they sat for their portraits by San Francisco photographer Christopher Irion. Irion specializes in the human face, and uses his homemade photo booth as a studio that allows his subjects to pose in privacy while he snaps their pictures through a small window.

“We had farmers, we had ranchers, we had vintners, we had winemakers,” said Irion. “There were lots of staff and local people from the businesses in Yountville as well as lots of residents and their kids and their pets. It was great.”

His trip to Yountville, funded by a grant from the in-construction Bardessono Inn and Spa on Yount Street, was the latest leg in Irion’s 8,000-plus-mile odyssey across America with his lightweight, portable booth. Setting up at county fairs, outside cafés and in parking lots, Irion has made more than 2,000 individual portraits in 23 communities around the country.

“The whole idea is really to create a private space in a public place,” said Irion. “You’re catching people with their guard down. The public mask disappears.”

People inside the booth can’t see Irion, although he chats with them as he aims his camera.

He takes the photographs from each location and combines them in a grid to form a mural that he calls a “community portrait,” where everyone can see their neighbors’ faces along with their own. “It’s less about the individual portraits than it is about the community getting to see itself,” Irion explained. Each black-and-white image in the Yountville mural will be 16 inches by 24 inches—larger than life, when seen up close—and the mural itself will be 10 feet high and 72 feet long.

Expansive as that seems, Irion had room for just 215 individual prints in the Yountville mural; more than 400 people showed up, and some had to be turned away. “We had people doubling up and becoming friends and saying ‘I’ll be photographed with you,’” he said. Families and workmates also posed as groups.

“There were just some really wonderful families,” Irion said. Among them were vintners Robert and Maria Sinskey and their two daughters, while winemaker Ashley Heisey and grape breeder Alan Tenscher brought their two young sons.

Star chef Michael Chiarello, whose new NapaStyle eatery is in Yountville’s V Marketplace, also stepped into Irion’s booth, while a pair of bakers from Bouchon Bakery posed with their handsomest loaves. Even construction workers from the Bardessono project, which is being built by local contractors, agreed to sit for Irion’s digital camera. Among the pets who joined their humans in Irion’s photo booth were many dogs and one “very attractive young brown rabbit,” he said.

The mural, “A Yountville Portrait,” will make its debut today with a reception for all of the participants. Each individual or group that posed will receive an invitation and a print of the individual portrait. But when they all gather, along with other community members, in front of the mural: “To me, this is really where the magic happens,” Irion said. “There they are, standing in front of themselves and everybody else. You get to see your community is larger than the six or seven people you like to hang out with, along with the person who serves you coffee in the morning and the checkout clerk at the supermarket. It’s much more complex and richer and more interesting than you think.”

After its installation this month, the mural will remain on display at Yount and Washington streets until November, when the Bardessono Inn and Spa will be nearly completed; the inn is scheduled to open in February. For more information about Irion’s projects, visit www.irionphotography.com.