The One Photo I Wish Every Family Would Take

Don't wait for the "perfect time"—the people you love are worth remembering exactly as they are today.

There are photographs you take because everyone looks nice.

There are photographs you take because the kids are growing too fast, because someone lost a tooth, because it’s Christmas, because it’s senior year, because everyone happened to be together in the same place at the same time.

And then there are photographs you don’t understand the importance of until much later.

I understand that now in a way I wish I didn’t.

I lost my mom last year.

Toward the end of her life, everything felt overwhelming. My own life was complicated and messy, and there were so many things happening at once. There were times when I sat beside my mom and we simply watched television. I didn’t always know what to say. I didn’t ask all the questions I now wish I had asked. I didn’t collect every story or memory.

At the time, I think part of me believed there would somehow always be more time.

There wasn’t.

And now, photographs of her feel completely different.

They aren’t just photographs anymore.

They are proof that she was here.

They are the way her face looked when she laughed. The way she stood next to my children. The way our family looked when all of us were still together.

That experience has changed the way I think about photography.

I’ve been a photographer for more than 20 years, and for a long time I thought my job was to make beautiful photographs.

It still is.

But I think there is something bigger happening when I photograph a family.

Because someday, one of those photographs might become someone’s favorite possession.

And you have absolutely no idea which photograph it will be.

It probably won’t be the photograph where everyone is perfectly posed and every hair is exactly where it belongs.

It might be the one where your child is leaning against you.

The one where somebody is laughing.

The one where your kid is looking at you instead of looking at my camera.

The one that feels like your family.

That is the photograph I wish every family would take.

Not when you lose ten pounds.

Not when the kids finally learn to cooperate for pictures.

Not when work settles down.

Not when life becomes less chaotic.

Now.

I think that is part of why coming back to photography has started to mean so much to me.

I stepped away for a long time. Life happened. My son arrived three and a half months early. My family needed me. My mom became sick. Photography, which had once been such a huge part of who I was, moved further and further into the background.

And now I’m finding my way back.

It’s scary starting again after so much time. I’m rebuilding my website. I’m writing blogs again. I’m reminding people that I’m still here. I’m trying to figure out social media and all the things that apparently photographers are supposed to understand now.

And today, right in the middle of all of that, I got another proposal booking.

I actually said, “Yay!”

Because it felt like more than another job on the calendar.

Someone is about to ask another person to spend their life with them, and I get to be there to photograph the moment.

They don’t know exactly what that photograph is going to mean to them yet.

None of us ever do.

That’s the strange thing about photographs.

We take them for today.

But so often, we’re really taking them for someday.

So get in the picture.

Even if life is messy.

Especially if life is messy.

Your children will not care whether you thought you looked perfect.

Someday, they will just be incredibly grateful that you were there.