Mi familia

Members of the beginning level Panhandle Jazz Band warm up before performing at Stubb's Music Studio's fall recital in Tallahassee, FL.

I went home this last weekend to Tallahassee to see my younger brother perform in a fall concert and it was great both to hear him and see my family. Witnessing Mikey become more interested in music and in creating and engaging in the arts has been a very cool process to follow over the last several years. More recently he's started to get deeper into jazz and improvisation, which is pretty much the raddest thing I can think of for a high school kid to learn about. I only wish that I knew who Charles Mingus was when I was 16. By the way, Mikey played very well both in solo on the piano and in the jazz band. (The above picture is of some of the other members of the jazz band).

This morning I finally had a chance to look through the few frames that I made of Mikey this weekend at the jazz recital, and I began to think about the role that photographing my family and personal life has played in my career. Taking pictures of their friends and family is a very natural thing for any photographer to do, but I came to it in earnest much later during college. And honestly, it was only when I turned the camera on my life, my friends, and my loved ones that I began to develop my sense of style and use of light. Because I had only ever wanted to be a newspaper photographer, it wasn't until I was exposed to work like Sylvia Plachy's, which ignored whatever invisible lines might have existed between personal and professional, that I found the incredible value in trying to make good pictures of my favorite people.

Photographing my family became the way through which I was able to find my own voice in a sense. I was free to shoot things anyway that I liked, and to try new methods and techniques that stuck me in the work of my heroes. And in shooting people that I love I was connected to the deep well of emotion that can reside in a photograph that makes it rise above images made without such care for the subject. That sounds strange but I didn't get that before in such an immediate way. It's so simple though. Pictures made with love result in photographs that have a special power about them. And its held true throughout my career. To this day the best body of work that I've ever created is almost certainly my essay on the end of my grandfather's life (Life After Grammie), which was a project that developed purely out of my need to be with him during that time and try to understand how he could feel finished with living.

Despite my enthusiasm for photographing loved ones I'm actually very bad about including myself in that category. My girlfriend and I really don't have any good pictures of us together and she's often complained of how that's possible considering my profession. So, to my dear girlfriend: I hereby promise to make more pictures of us together before the end of this year! There I've said it. Shit, that could be a dangerous precedent actually. Before you know it she'll have me using the blog to promise to clean the dishes or wash my clothes more often.

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