Photography For Life: 20 Years of Articles on What Matters

It occurs to me that this current website update has me fully in my feels. As I construct galleries and pages I’ve been contemplative. Thinking about my two decades plus as a professional family and child photographer…thinking about my current shift into more high school senior focus, knowing that I may not see most of these “kids” again as who I’ve known them to be but maybe an older “more adult” version of who they are becoming.

I’ve been thinking about my goals of creating “photography for life” for my clients for all these years and all the life experiences surrounding this life I lead: both personal and professional.

I’ve been ruminating on what makes some photography great, most photography good and other photos just ‘eh’. What strikes me as a beautiful moment between me and mine may seem mundane to an onlooker so I am also thinking about perspective and the richness of experiencing life through ones own lens (so to speak). So I am reflecting upon our own personal experiences and relationships as humans just trying to make sense of this complicated life through each other, because of each other.

In parallel – I have raised two daughters from early childhood into adulthood and that experience has also taught me a lessons in this life: lessons in both photography (how my business started: photographing my own two beautiful babes) and in the bittersweet heartache of being a mom to growing children.

My background has led me to this place of realization: family photography is about far more than beautiful images. It’s about documenting relationships, existence, time and place. It truly is photography FOR life.

Which totally sounds like something every photographer says (and there’s a lot of us saying it). But with the benefit of being a mom and a photographer’s 20+ year hindsight ( + other life/professional experiences): I mean it from a tiered perspective rooted in the observation of time and as someone who sat with the very sick and dying and with their family and fully understands the limitation of our time here.

For many years I worked as an ICU Registered Nurse, caring for critically ill patients and the families that surrounded and supported them. Sometimes through their illness and sometimes to the next phase beyond this life. Around COVID I spent a couple of years working in hospice and home health, caring for people in their own spaces amongst their people (and sometimes, sadly, not-so-much). I found a joy in my time in hospice that seems contradictory to the type of work I was doing. A quiet joy in celebrating life AND death all-at-once.

(I find that in our death averse culture this is a profoundly dramatic proclamation but I will stick by it. There are lessons to learn from those nearing the end of their life. It is vital that we learn these in order to fully embrace LIFE.)

Years and countless moments of just sitting with people at the most profound moments of human experience – childhood, from maternity and newborn photography to childhood photography and in nursing during crisis, death, and everything in between. I’ve spent time in some of the most fabulous homes that dreams are made of and during my time in home health: in the most humble of spaces that housed human lives. I’ve been blessed to lead an extraordinary existence with experiences that twist and turn in their diversity and different-ness but that culminate to distill in some sort of meaning for me.

Ultimately what I’ve learned in those years is that what people reach for when life gets hard isn’t their accomplishments or their possessions, it’s not their cars or televisions…it’s not their $5,000 handbags or their collectible time pieces. It’s their people. Their photos. Their memories. The proof that they belonged to something larger than themselves and the people that made up those parts of their stories that mean the most.

Time after time: in the most humble of spaces, in the ICU rooms, in the lavish living spaces of the finest of homes: PHOTOGRAPHY seems to always find itself as a witness. Not only the proof that people and moments HAPPENED but the thing that can be held in one’s hands and they leave this plane and onto the next. More often than not photographs touch the lives of the ill and dying as much as they surround those who live. In nearly every home I have visited, from the humble to the grand: photography FOR life is on display. If not in beautiful large portraits displayed over mantles and in hallways then on desktops, tabletops and in quiet and private spaces.

Photography for Life: The Foundation

The images I create aren’t simply for pure decoration, although they are beautiful enough for decor and often serve to beautify a space.

They’re anchors: emotional and deeply human anchors that do quiet daily work via visual repetition in the homes where they’re displayed. A child walking past a family portrait on the way to school. A struggling teenager stopping in front of a birthday photo. A young adult, far from home for the first time, carrying the visual memory of where they came from.

This is what Photography For Life means to me. It’s not only a cutesy tagline (although it is – cutesy). It isn’t a simple marketing concept packaged up with iconography (although I do love the simplicity of the upside down lotus that has meaning to me). No, it’s far more than that.

“Photography For Life” stems from a deeply held, genuine belief – built from personal experience, from 20+ years of watching families grow, and from the research that increasingly confirms what many of us already feel intuitively. Also it’s built from my own experiences as a nurse at the bedside of the very sickest of the sick: displayed family photography matters in ways that go far beyond aesthetics.

In my bio on this site I discuss briefly about my time in the ICU as a nurse at the bedside of the sick and dying. I glossed over the thoughts that put me into my photographer role and why I chose photography of life, photography FOR life in place of the profession I trained for for many years. In the exploration of my thoughts on photography I will touch upon those moments where I would sit in a patient’s room and gaze upon all the imagery surrounding their bedside – photos of happier moments, photos of family. Photos OF life. This is my plan for this articles section…

The articles written under this header and on the Professional Child Photographer site are where I put my thoughts down, think aloud about the meaning of photography and how it can positively impact human lives. From choosing a photographer that resonates with your aesthetics and your philosophy to the psychology of belonging and how the power of printed images on displays can positively impact a young person.

When I conceptualized my 2023 logo and tagline (as you see here) I literally thought about those long nights at the bedside of the critically ill and being amongst those memories and thought about my own legacy: what impression did I want to leave on this world. I kept thinking about the precipice of life and death – the threshold state I myself, had found myself in and how I wanted to witness life. Ultimately I came up with the concept of photography FOR life. Documenting life.

So if you’re a parent trying to grapple with quality vs. quantity or cost vs. value…I get it. But I also put my money where my mouth is and also understand why family photography is worth the investment.

If you’re stepping beyond the “we should probably get around to it someday” stage into the “let’s get serious about this” stage – I think you’re in the right place.

Welcome to Marmalade. Photography for Life.