Chicago
Connections. Moments. Family. These are the things I observe again and again in my work. What combination of connections and moments add up to being a family?
Is it a sense of understanding? Of knowing your place? Of feeling accepted?
Within our family, we each play a special role that might be, and often is, very different from the roles we play elsewhere. There is kindness, sweetness, and there is also unabashedness and occasional rebellion.
When I work with families, what I see, and what I love to see, is understanding. Not necessarily comprehension. But a sense of understanding, of just “getting” what’s happening. Even though one might not comprehend or appreciate another family member’s actions, it is so “them,” that it is accepted on some level.
And, through this basic acceptance, there is trust. Perhaps strange and incomprehensible to the outside, but inside, a family has its own system of trust and acceptance and understanding that keeps the whole thing going like a bunch of wacky gears inside a cartoon clock.
I grew up with a family. I know what they’re like.
They’re gorgeous.
Under one roof, these people gather and they joke and they cry and they strive and they hope. The sun comes up and moves across their lives to the bed-time story; eyes blink shut and it all begins again.
Words form. Memories. She stopped playing with that toy. I swore in front of the baby. He dropped his diploma graduating from kindergarten. Piles of moments form into mounds, the mounds form into mountain ranges. We walk through these hills and valleys all of our lives, and some of the moments spring back, and some of them blend into a general feeling — peak or valley, high or low.
Life itself is entwined with family, connections of all kinds, whatever your definition is. Family is the place you can rest. The usual. The chaotically wonderful. The perfectly bizarre. However it feels to you, it is familiar.
When I shoot, I’m looking for the trust, the familiarity. I try to record traces of joyful evidence that these individuals come together and do the bravest things people can do – love, struggle, try, laugh when it’s hard to find humor, cry when it’s hard to find joy.
Win, and be brave enough to accept success in front of others. Lose, and be brave enough to feel sad.
Family stretches us and helps us grow. Sometimes reluctantly. Sometimes in exactly the way that we need.
When I look at a family, I see a morphing entity. An invisible bubble surrounding the individuals within it. A pile of shared moments binds them loosely together, yet the strings connecting them stretch and contract over time. There’s no telling what the future holds for any of them. And so, each clings to certain strings, those that define them, those that comfort them, those that give them a sense of place, or those that are something to rebel against.
Maybe this is what family is: The strings to hold onto. It is something that seems to last when the sun keeps rising and setting, and nothing ever stays the same.
These photos were shot on location in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, June 2015.
