The Beginning of a “Year in the Life” Family Photography Project in Taipei
These photos are from a first session for a quarterly Year in the Life project (4 sessions a year), and I like to think that by the time the year is up, I’ll have captured one small chapter of this family’s story for them to look back on together. I imagine my photos being conversation pieces at family gatherings, prompting laughter or gentle teasing. I hope people will say this is where we came from. This is what led us here.
How to Take Pictures of Your Kids (Part 1: Mindset)
This is a weird title for a blog post, because obviously, all you have to do to take a picture of your kid is point your phone at them and press the camera button. I’m not talking about the technical aspect of taking pictures of your kids, though (at least not in this post). I’m talking about how to get in the headspace that’ll allow you to document your life with your kids while both living in the moment and thinking about the future.
A Full Day in the Life Session in Taipei
The irony is that when it comes to documentary family photography, it’s really true that the more time I have to spend with a family, the better. Of course I can capture some beautiful/funny/true moments in as little as two hours, but they’ll always be a smaller slice of a bigger (and delicious!) pie. This is why I call my 2-hour sessions “A Glimpse.” When I’m with a family for a longer time, this is what happens:
5 Tips for Organizing and Enjoying your Photos in the Age of Digital Clutter
Always, the key is to make finding and seeing your photos as frictionless as possible. If it’s too hard or overwhelming for us to revisit our favorite memories, we just won’t do it. Remove some of those barriers and take a few easy steps that make it easier for you and your loved ones to engage with the story of your lives. It’s so worth it!
Kicking off the new year with a travel documentary family photography session!
I love noticing and making art out of the rhythms of home life because “home” is a story we all know and are shaped by, so I’m as surprised as anybody by how much I love documenting these adventures that families go on when they come to Taiwan. There’s still so much to notice—relationships, touches, glances, rolled eyes, actions and reactions, exhaustion, wonder. People are who they are even when they’re not in their usual environment. If home is a story that’s more about the characters than the setting, then it’s a story that can be told anywhere.
A Beach Maternity Session in Taipei
I don’t typically do maternity sessions because, by their very nature (with the goal being to capture the mother in her goddess-like state), they usually need to be more posed. However, Jen was happy to just hang out in the beautiful golden light of Baishawan Beach at sunset and the photos just flowed. She ended up looking like a goddess anyway—there was no way for that not to happen!
Photographing a Special Birthday Party in Taipei
There was slime, there was cake being slammed into faces, and there was a cat eating things that clearly weren’t food (and liking it!). There was also a lot of hugs.
Documenting Baby Teeth Smiles
I’m no longer interested in using my photography to make a grand statement about who I am as an artist. I find more artistic fulfillment when the photos are less about me and more about stories about families—family bonds, family sagas, family lore. This is a more universal conversation about themes that are greater than me. This is a deeper pool for me to swim in.
Family photography at the Jianguo Flower Market, Ximending, and other crowded places.
I love that clients who value similar things find their way to me—I end up working with some very adventurous people! Here are some photos from a recent documentary photography session that, over the span of two hours, covered: Daan Park, the Jianguao Flower Market, the Jianguo Jade Market, the MRT, and Ximending. These are storytelling photos that incorporate places in Taipei that are important to them, but they also can’t help but be beautiful family photos. Photos with a group of people who love each other always are.
Year in the Life: An entire year of storytelling with family photos.
It’s the most satisfying kind of work to be invited into a family’s inner circle and be trusted enough to help them see and remember themselves. I hope the photobook I hand them at the end of the year will be a kind of mirror, and that they’ll see the best parts of who they are together reflected back.
Moments worth documenting happen everywhere—even FamilyMart.
I often joke over the fact that so many of the families I work with include a trip to the neighborhood FamilyMart or 7-11 in their session time. I seriously could make a book with these convenience store photos at this point, which tells me that there’s something important going on here. I think the neighborhood convenience stores are embedded in our family routine now. When we look back on these photos, we remember hot summers in Taiwan, the smell of tea eggs, and picking out our favorite ice cream from the freezer in the back. We think of the way our kids skipped down the street thinking of the treat that was waiting for them, and then the sticky popsicle kiss that we got afterward. These are the gems.
A Documentary Family Photography Session at the Taipei Zoo
I photograph a lot of beautiful, unforgettable moments, but I don’t shy away from the tears and the hard work of parenting. The stories worth remembering and passing on are the ones that are whole, with all the juicy bits included.
A Mother-Daughter Documentary Family Photography Session in Taipei
I consider it a special honor to photograph single parents living out this mission. Most of them are insanely busy with having to work and be the sole caretaker of their child; there usually isn’t another adult around to take photos of them with their kid. I want to make sure that they have some photos to look back on with them in the picture. I want them to see how hard they work, how much they love and are loved.
A Year of Documentary Family Photography in Taipei
I’ve been documenting the lives of families—of all shapes and sizes—in Taipei for about a year now. I had no idea when I started if anyone would be interested in letting me hang out and be a photojournalist for their family for several hours, and to be honest, documentary family photography still isn’t all that popular in Taiwan. But as far as the families who understand the storytelling power of documentary photography and want it, working with them is a privilege. It feels as if they’re taking a chance and letting me see their whole heart.
Taking My Time with Family Photography
I love to see how defenses fall and behavior becomes more uninhibited the more time I spend with a family. There’s a good chance a child will end up jumping on the bed naked, and yes, I will photograph it for you.
A documentary family photography session at Dihua Street in Taipei.
When we make photos to remember and cherish our lives as they are now with the people we love, we slow time just a tiny bit by weighing it down with our attention. This is a scientific fact, I’m sure.
Who do I photograph for?
I’m not the first photographer to say this but it bears repeating: photographing for ourselves yields better results than photographing for other people, even when you’re technically making the photos for other people. There’s no way for me to scientifically prove this, but I swear making photos that I would want of my own family gives them some sort of pixie dust. Also, I have a very simple probably kind of small brain—it’s not big enough to hold things like experimentation, curiosity, and wonder if it’s also holding other people’s expectations. Maybe those are the ingredients to the pixie dust.
A month at home with family and why photography feels more important than ever.
I spend a lot of time assuring my clients that their everyday routine—and all of the happy/sad/funny/boring/weird moments that are cultivated in the space of that routine—are worth capturing and looking back on. The month of November was my turn to live out that belief.
Shooting what it feels like, not what it looks like.
There are many little tricks that help keep my observational senses primed so that I can notice the emotional, the fleeting, in other words, the interesting—using a wide angle lens and shooting in it, not at it, slowing down. But perhaps my favorite mantra that I like to keep in mind is shoot what it feels like, not what it looks like.
Kids cry a lot—do you want to remember it?
As a documentary family photographer in Taipei, Taiwan—a place where true documentary family photography is virtually unheard of at the moment—I am always helping people put a name to the thing that they know they want deep down but don’t know what to call it or how to get it. Most of my clients also get posed photos or lifestyle photos to put in a Christmas card for Grandma, but for them, for the photos they hold in their hands and look back on while they’re crying laughing over the way their kid is wearing underwear on his head, they want real moments. They know that the kind of moments that elicit a deep emotional response don’t typically come from standing in a field at sunset, but most of them don’t realize that what they’re looking for is documentary photography until they find me.