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.

There is no shortcut to getting the raw moments of family interaction; I don’t think you can get them by creating a stage for people to act out family life upon. You can get beautiful pictures this way, for sure, but the image will not be a true moment that happened. There is no shortcut to making photos of true moments; life simply needs to be lived and someone needs to be there to anticipate the decisive moment, see it, and capture it. The photo that you end up with might not be as beautiful—in a technical sense—as what you end up with from a posed photo. Instead, the photo will be a jolt of electricity, a jump to another time that will never happen again; it’ll make you feel something.

Last night, I was reading The Velveteen Rabbit with my younger son, and the Velveteen Rabbit asked the Skin Horse (which my son calls the “Creepy Horse” because he thinks Skin Horse sounds like something from a horror movie) if it hurts to become real. The Skin Horse replies sometimes. I think real photos can hurt sometimes too, but I would never want to wave a magic wand and make them all disappear. You cannot be alive in the world and avoid the sharp corners. I guess you could do your best to only remember everything good and soft, but do you want to? How many people and experiences would you lose by trying to forget how they hurt you?

My clients who crave real photos—whether they know that what they want is called documentary photography or not—seem to understand this. I have never once had a parent ask me not to photograph their child when they get hurt or cry. In fact, they seem to especially want me to capture the moments that aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. They already know that some part of them will miss this, and that the little person refusing to eat or go to bed is becoming someone else before their eyes.

I tell my clients that I’m not afraid of anything—tears streaming from eyes, snot running from noses, blood spurting, poop … doing something—I will photograph it all. I want to remember it all. These moments feel big and scary now, but if you’re afraid to capture them, all you’ll have later is an incomplete picture.

The complete picture isn’t just the skinned knee, it’s the hugs that come after.

The complete picture needs both the tears and the embrace to make sense. If you take one away, we lose the context that makes it beautiful, that realness. Sometimes, being real hurts. But it sure does make us feel something.