From bride to mother & the photos that marked the way

I first met Rachel and Ron in the heart of lockdown. They planned a tiny wedding on a terrace at the Bowery Hotel conducted over zoom as was the only way at the time. It was joyous and exuberant and oddly perfect for them. Lockdown gave a small handful of couples permission to truly lean into the unorthodox. Couples who could never have gotten away with small weddings of one or two guests truly shined. Rachel glowed.

A few years passed, Rachel was all aglow again, this time with the unmistakable beauty of a mother to be. The pregnancy path was not easy so it felt right to document the moment with photos. She and Ron came to my studio in Brooklyn. I got to hear about how their lives had changed since the wedding, how excited they were for the baby to join them. I got to witness Rachel, again, in all the glory of this rite of passage.

It was only a few months before I got to meeting baby Liv. We waited until she was out of the infancy stage when I could witness her personality start to take shape. A relationship with her mother already in bloom. My own mother passed away over a decade ago. I often think of her now. I’m in the middle of my life and it’s unclear if I too will be mother, but I wonder what her maternity time was like for her anyway. I wonder what she looked like and how she felt. I like to imagine Liv discovering these photos in twenty or thirty years. Imagining who her mother was before she knew her. Piecing together the story of herself and getting to experience this moment through her mother’s (and my) eyes.

So much about the work I do is about marking the important moments in your lives. It’s about witnessing your intimacy and allowing me to be in on the secret of it all, to live through it with you if only for a brief moment, a deep intimacy built in short bursts.