While visiting Portland in August, I had the pleasure of spending a Sunday morning with my friend Kat, her fiance Greg, and son Stokely (though baby Sojourner wouldn’t join the family until a week later) — documenting a few hours of their day.
A documentary-style family shoot was a new and experimental journey for me, and I was so anxious leading up to it I had to talk myself out of cancelling throughout the entire trek out to Aloha where the McKelveys live. Aside from taking my camera around with me and getting a few shots here and there with friends and family, I’d never done an entire shoot solely dedicated to photographing one group of people just living their lives. But, I’ve found when I’m beginning to get too comfortable in my photography, I enjoy putting myself in situations that are out of my element and often limit my control in some way. It’s actually how I began shooting film to begin with. The idea of doing a shoot where I couldn’t plan or necessarily decide on what would happen next, what the lighting might be, whether this would look better in black and white or color, etc. was both terrifying and thrilling. Though my shoots are typically pretty go-with-the-flow and I don’t direct models much, there’s a whole new level of unpredictability when photographing people just going about their business — especially when one is a toddler.
As soon as we started though, I fell in love with the simplicity and honesty of it all — from Stokely sharing his toys with me (my favorite examples below), to throwing food on the floor, to having a meltdown when we tried to get some shots of everyone outside (I mean, being separated from his basketball was definitely the end of the world, right?). The photos are hardly “perfect,” but one of my goals was to let go and accept that I wouldn’t have this figured out on the first go — and maybe the nature of documentary photography isn’t focusing on getting that perfect picture, but telling a story.
Shot on my Canon EOS 3 and Olympus XA, with a combination of Tri-X 400, Tmax 400, Ilford HP5 400, and Portra 400.
Follow the McKelvey family through their morning here.
