My Style
The moment everything changed for me.
I was sitting on the couch, toys strewn across the room, nursing my sweet baby, while my toddler tried to brush through my tangled hair that hadn’t been brushed in at least 3 days. While trying to keep my baby from grabbing my glasses of my face (her newest fascination) and wincing as my toddler tried to be gentle, something switched in me and suddenly I wasn’t counting down the moments to when I could get up and get on with my day.
Instead I found myself almost in a panic of wanting so badly to preserve the moment, to wrap my arms around the moment and hold onto it in my heart forever. So I called to my husband in the other room and said, “come take a picture of me.” Dutifully he complied. And the resulting picture, though not a photographic masterpiece has truly become something precious to me because it tells the story of my life right now (though still incompletly, because my husband is not in it).
As a photographer I take a lot of pictures of my family, but I am rarely in them, and when I am in them, it is usually posed. I have virtually no photos that capture the daily life with my family that I am a part of. I have thousands of pictures of my family, but very few of me being mom, being wife, being truly me living my real life. Not posed, not rehearsed, just authentic moments of life together.
Most families take a ton of pictures of their kids: funny faces, dance recitals, birthday parties. But what about our relationship with our kids. The relationships in our family are constantly changing, growing as our kids grow, and as we become different people because of them. And I want to remember these relationships as they are right now, because I know in a few months, in a few years, they will be different, and so will I. Every days is full of hundreds of moments, and like grains of sand they slip away and become our history, our story.
Documentary family photography enables me to capture a few of these moments and give them to a family as a way to preserve a piece of their story. Because all the moments, the sweet intimate ones, the hilarious ones, the exasperating ones, they are all part of the story of your family.
"Because every day our stories are being written in a thousand beautiful oridinary moments."
What is documentary family photography?
It's about real people, living real moments. Not posed, not always pretty. But always beautiful. Because it is all part of our story. Who we are and who we are becoming. Because every day our stories are being written in a thousand beautiful ordinary moments.
You don't have to awkwardly force a smile in front of the camera and try on a dozen matching outfits and get your kids to stop wiggling. In fact, I won't even ask you to look at the camera! You just get to be you. Your kids get to be themselves; nothing is forced.
It’s like having a friend come into your home on a regular day to capture all the little moments that make your life meaningful. It's about pictures that tell the story of your family— the unique personalities, the relationships, the love.
I would be honored to be that friend. To capture some of your ordinary beautiful moments, and give you the kind of pictures that your kids will cherish in 20 years because you are in them, being mom, being dad. To give you the kind of pictures I so long to have of my own family.
My favorite thing is to pick up my camera and capture real smiles that come organically, a quiet moment between siblings, the chaos, the snuggles, and yes, occasionally the tears.