A documentary family photography session at Dihua Street in Taipei.
If you believe a photo exists to present the best possible version of yourself to the world, then you can do things to make sure you’re telling the story you want to tell. You can decide to only take photos during golden hour when the light is soft and forgiving; you can carefully angle your body so that it’s a straight, flat plane without any unruly lumps; you can decide to delete the photo where your partner said something funny while you were drinking and then you sprayed water everywhere when you laughed. This is one way to do it, but I prefer to approach photography from a different angle.
Photos can also exist to remember life as it really happened. This doesn’t mean that the photographer won’t give any thought to how people look—I always do my best to capture moments in a way that isn’t unflattering to my clients. But it does mean that the real is valued over the ideal. 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.
I have no better opportunity to capture all of the best parts of life than with my Year in the Life families. I meet with these families over 12 months, and by the end of it, we have a body of work that gives an overview of their life—from a variety of times and seasons—as it really was during that particular year. After the first session or two, people tend to get pretty creative about what they want me to come over and capture, which is great because variety is the spice of life!
Eliza and Mike, a family who will be leaving Taiwan soon, chose to have me document a trip to Dihua Street, Taiwan’s bustling Lunar New Year market. I’ll admit, when I first heard this idea I wondered if the crushing crowds would be too distracting in their photos. But then I thought, what better way to establish a sense of time and place in the photobook I’m going to give them at the end of the year? It ended up being one of the most fun photo sessions I’ve ever done, mostly due to how Eliza and Mike were always game to try new things and document the experience. Little did I know, I would even have the opportunity to document a fortune teller at work. I had no idea family photography could be this exciting!
Really, there’s no reason to fear crowds, less-than-ideal lighting, or any other challenge that’ll come and try to “ruin” your photos. You can trust that small voice that’s telling you that you don’t have to care, that when you’re old you’re going to want to remember what this feels like and not what you looked like. Okay, maybe you’ll also want to remember what you looked like, but you’ll be kinder to yourself. You’ll want to remember what happy looks like, what loved looks like. That’s definitely a scientific fact.