07/04/2024
I want my images to feel like you’ve just pulled them from a shoebox, maybe a little dog-eared or a crease across an old sky. More specifically than a “candid style” or a “documentary approach,” I want you to feel that old silky feeling of real nostalgia flooding in when you crack open that digital box. I want the smell of an old kitchen to come up, the dampness of a creek dress, your daughter’s hair nuzzled into your neck. It is not enough for me to capture you; I want you to taste it dripping down your chin.
What I have learned more recently from my work is this crucial fact: I create the most magic when the humans in front of me completely surrender to my lens. They throw out any expectation, stop worrying about their clothes, let the little ones be whoever they are in that moment. This was exactly what happened with the Lawson family last week in the golden hour creekbed, and because of it I created some of my favorite images to date. When you trust the person behind the camera - really trust them - a kind of reciprocal magic occurs between artist and subject. It’s like this peek into a crack in the universe, a black hole of energy and movement and emotion. It’s the peep into someone’s life - a real life. A throbbing, beating, alive life.
These images are not overly magnificent in their context or their background, but they still yank at something deep in me. What we did was not something that took effort or planning or posing - we simply let the kids play in the creek. We let her diaper fill, let her cry into her mother’s chest because she was chilly, let the boy collect sticks and rocks and dirt on his clothes. I waddled around the fields seven months pregnant and we talked of motherhood. Most of all, they surrendered to this season of their lives, and I did what I do best: I was relentlessly, mercilessly, incessantly a witness to all of it.
