When I look at what drove me to learn photography, I need only to look at my children.
I want to leave something for my kids to own of our lives. I want my children to have a photographic story of our lives that I don’t have.
My children love nothing more than sitting down and looking at their lives in pictures in an album or at a photo collage hanging on the wall.
My children’s reality is much different from my own. My parents, they owned a camera, but it wasn’t used very often. It always seemed like a hassle, you had to get the film developed and no one knew how to use it.
There are very few images of my immediate family and my childhood. This reality became sadly obvious after we lost my brother in 2010. We had two family portraits. One from 1988 and one from my wedding in 2003.
This is where we have the advantage today. We can easily take selfies and snapshots with our smart phones and post them to Facebook for all our families to see and enjoy.
The instant gratification these images offer is great but they really tell the story of our lives? Are they something you want to pass down to your kids? Will they even get printed off your phone?
In this, I understood why I photograph.
I photograph to tell the story of a family, of siblings, of grandparents and of pets. I photograph so that the love and relationships you share are preserved so that you have those memories for tomorrow. Sometimes it’s a candid laugh or a silly pose. Maybe it’s a quiet moment with your children.
Your family, both human and animal, deserves to exist in photographs.
Karra-R&T
Me and my kids (circa 2013)
