Expanding on my last post, I’d like to talk about photographing for my friends families. There’s something special about being able to document a group of faces in a moment in time. I guess it’s intrinsically human to want to see how faces relate to one another in families. Ever since the photograph was invented, people flocked to see what their grandparents looked like when they were young. To see how our cousins and uncles might’ve shared the same facial shape as our own parents.
Imagine living before the photograph was invented, and then all of a sudden this machine comes along and now we can really see what our lost relatives looked like twenty, thirty, or a hundred years before. Taking family portraits is kind of like being a small part in a chain of historians. Although I don’t know how many photographers choose to be historians, it’s kind of an inevitable part of the process. Documenting the shifting sands on the always changing faces of a family. Is that too much metaphor?
