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.
A Documentary Newborn Session in Taipei
Your life has undergone a seismic shift; in another month or year, it'll be different still. We can't stop your life from changing or your baby from growing, but we capture important moments from this time so that you'll be able to remember what it was like to hold your newborn baby when you're holding your newborn grandchild. I don't just make photos of your baby, I make photos of who you are with your baby as well. I make photos of the new shape of your family.
A Birth at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taipei
I am first and foremost interested in documenting the ever-evolving story of family, and birth is a big part of that. Birth photography isn’t just about capturing new life, it’s also about bearing witness to the expansion of a tribe. You’re making photos of a lot of new beginnings at once.
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.
Documenting Family on Vacation
I thought I knew what I would be photographing when I started documenting families: people at home among their things and their routine; wanting to preserve a slice of life while they were in their element. What I didn’t expect was how many people would hire me to document their families while they were out of their element, crammed in a hotel room with underwear drying on a shower curtain and suitcases that looked like they had projectile vomited diapers and onesies across the room.
Word Muses
I’ve done some online training for documentary family photography that suggests identifying a muse once you arrive for a session. This doesn’t mean that you only photograph this person, but the idea is that most of the interesting things happen around the muse. If you keep your eye on the muse and what they’re doing, you’ll end up with better storytelling photos for everyone.
I sometimes do this, but what’s even more helpful to me is latching onto certain word themes that come up repeatedly when I’m chatting with a client. If it keeps coming up, there’s a deeper story happening here. They’re no longer just words, but symbols for something deeply meaningful to this family.
The Beginning
I started my documentary family photography business in Taipei last March without having any idea if anyone even wanted these kinds of photos; I only knew that these were the photos I wanted to make.