There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs of your children on your phone. Your baby asleep on your partner’s chest. Your toddler laughing at the breakfast table. Dad carrying someone through the yard or curled up with them on the couch. Bath time, bedtime, birthday mornings, ordinary Saturdays. You took those photographs because you noticed something worth keeping.
And because you were the one taking them, you are probably missing from more of your family’s story than you realize.
Mothers are often the family historians
In so many families, Mom is the person who notices. You see the way your baby reaches for Dad’s face, the way your child looks when they’re concentrating, or the way everyone somehow ends up tangled together on the couch at the end of the day. You see the photograph before anyone else does, so you reach for your phone and make it.
Over time, though, a strange version of family history can start to form. There are photographs of the children, photographs of Dad with the children, photographs of vacations and birthdays and Christmas mornings. Then there are a handful of photographs of Mom: maybe a Mother’s Day picture, a selfie, or the occasional photo you specifically asked someone else to take.
You were there for all of it, but the photographs don’t always show that.
The photographs mothers want aren’t necessarily portraits
When a mother says she doesn’t have enough pictures with her children, I don’t think she is usually asking for more photographs of everyone standing together and smiling at the camera. She wants the kinds of pictures she takes herself.
She wants a photograph of the baby sleeping against her shoulder, or the toddler climbing into her lap while she’s trying to drink coffee. She wants the bedtime books, the hair brushing after a bath, the child hanging onto her leg in the kitchen, the small hand that automatically reaches for hers when they cross a room.
These are not extraordinary events. They’re the repetitive, ordinary pieces of family life that are easy to overlook because they happen constantly. But they’re also the things that change quietly and disappear before you realize they were ending.
Those are the photographs mothers make of everyone else. They deserve to exist in them too.
Why I photograph families this way
Documentary family photography gives me the freedom to pay attention to what is already happening rather than constantly interrupting it to make a picture. I’m watching how your children interact with you when no one is asking them to smile, how you instinctively touch their hair when they pass you, how they climb onto you without asking, and how your family moves around one another in the spaces you live in every day. These are the pictures I want myself – the pictures I wish that I had.
That doesn’t mean there is no thought behind the photographs. I’m paying attention to light, composition, gesture, movement and the relationships happening within a frame. I may move us toward a room with better light or suggest an activity that gives everyone somewhere natural to settle. But I am not trying to manufacture a version of your family that only exists for the camera.
The goal is not to create evidence that your family looked perfect. The goal is to create evidence that this was your life together, and that you were part of it.
Your children will want photographs of you, too
We tend to think about family photographs as something we are making for ourselves, but eventually they become part of our children’s history. Years from now, they will look through these pictures and notice things that probably felt unimportant when the photograph was taken: the house they grew up in, the chair everyone sat in, the toys scattered across the floor, the way their parents looked when they were young.
And they will look for you.
They won’t care that you hadn’t done your hair that morning or that the kitchen wasn’t spotless. They won’t study the parts of yourself you were self-conscious about. They will see their mother holding them, laughing with them, reading to them, comforting them and living alongside them.
They will get to see what it looked like to be loved by you.
For once, you don’t have to be the one taking the picture
Maybe this is one of the simplest reasons to have your family photographed. For a little while, you don’t have to be the person documenting everyone else.
You don’t have to notice a beautiful moment and immediately reach for your phone. You don’t have to hand the camera to someone and explain what you want. You don’t have to decide whether to stay inside the moment or step outside of it long enough to preserve it.
You can just be there.
I’ll notice the rest.