Get In The Photo. Your Children Don't Care How You Look.

I have almost no photographs of myself with my own children.

It's a strange thing to admit, for someone whose whole life is photography. I have thousands of images of other people's families — but when I go looking for pictures of me with mine, there's almost nothing. I was always the one behind the camera. Always the one saying "one more" to everyone else, never stepping in front to be part of it myself.

My children have told me this makes them sad. And they're right to feel that way. One day, a photograph of me — however I looked that day, whatever I was wearing, whether my hair was done — will be the only version of me they have left to hold onto.

I understand this from the other direction too. My own grandmother, and her mother before her, died before I had the chance to know them properly. What I have of them is a handful of old photographs my parents kept — creased, faded, some barely in focus. I am endlessly grateful those photographs exist at all. They're not just images. They're the only proof I have that these women were real, that I come from somewhere, that a whole life happened before mine did.

This is why, on almost every family session I photograph, I try to talk someone into the frame who doesn't want to be there.

It's nearly always a woman. A mother, a grandmother. "Not today," she'll say. "I look tired." "I haven't done my hair." "Just get the kids — I'll be in the next one." I understand this instinct completely — I've felt it myself, plenty of times, on the other side of my own camera. There's something deeply uncomfortable about being looked at when you don't feel your best.

But here's what I've learned, watching hundreds of families over eighteen years: the children don't see any of that. They don't notice the wrinkles you're worried about, or the concealer you didn't have time to apply, or the ten pounds you wish weren't there. None of it registers to them. What they see is their mother. Their grandmother. The person whose face they love more than any other face in the world, exactly as she is.

So I keep asking. Gently, but I keep asking. And almost every time, when someone finally steps in — reluctantly, still a little unsure — something shifts in the room. I've watched a grandmother go from arms crossed at the edge of the garden to laughing in the middle of a pile of grandchildren within a few minutes. I've watched mothers who spent the whole session directing everyone else finally sit down and let themselves be photographed too, and cry a little when they saw the images afterwards.

That photograph — the one that almost didn't happen — is very often the one a family tells me they love most.

If you're a mother, a grandmother, the one who always takes the pictures and never appears in them: I'd love to help change that, even just once. Not a perfectly posed, everyone-looking-at-the-camera kind of photograph, necessarily — just a real one, of your family, with you actually in it. Your children won't remember how you looked that day. They'll just be grateful you were there.

my family portrait sessions →

If this is the year you finally get in the photo — whether it's a full family session, or just you and your children, or three generations together — I'd love to talk it through. You can see how my sessions work and what's included here →