Capturing the Moments
It is truly an honor to be the person gifted with taking family portraits. As a parent myself, I know these moments are all too fleeting, and as a mother I know that often we are left out of photos unless they are selfies. To photograph a mother with her children, their little arms wrapping around her, their eyes sparkling and bright with love, it is a great joy.
One of my first photoshoots in over a decade was a with an old friend, whom I hadn't seen in about the same amount of time. We met at William L Finley Wildlife Refuge, a quiet open land outside of Corvallis, Oregon with gently rolling hills that were tinged that golden-yellow of early autumn. We are both mothers now, more settled in our lives and ourselves. Between old friends who have not seen each other in a long time there is a sense of familiarity, but also there is the knowledge that so much has passed, that you are standing on different land than you were when last you spoke. That friendship also holds a version of you that no one else can hold, a you that no longer exists but is held only in another's mind.
When you think about people whose life goals have included never being forgotten (think of renowned kings and queens, famous musicians, infamous politicians, and legendary heroes and villains), really what they are doing is spreading different versions of themselves to as many people as possible. There are new versions of ourselves with every person we make an impression upon, and when we part ways with people who we were once close to, they hold a version suspended outside of life's continuity. That version will never exist again; it is unique both to the person you were and the person they are.
So, to me, family photography is especially precious because it holds in time those versions, those moments. As a parent, your mind is constantly full of the present moment, and the next, and the next. I don't mind admitting that since having my child, my phone has over 6,000 photographs, as I strive to hold in amber every moment from his sweet sleepy newborn phase to his hilarious playful toddler phase now. To capture those moments with someone who first entered my life twenty years ago, and at the same time hold up to the light the version I held of her, put a new layer on top of it, was truly a gift to me as an old friend and as a photographer.
