Think Your Family Is Too Boring for Photos?

San Diego Documentary Family Photographer

I hear some version of this all the time: “But we don’t really do anything.“

Usually it comes up when I suggest photographing a family at home or spending a few hours together. What are we possibly going to do while you take pictures of us for all that time? We don’t have charming Saturday morning traditions; the kids mostly play video games or watch Disney+, ask for snacks and leave their stuff everywhere. Perfect.

In more than a decade of photographing families, I have yet to meet one that actually does nothing. What people usually mean is that they don’t do anything that feels important enough to photograph and those are very different things.

You’re too close to your own life

Every family has its own tiny culture. You have your own routines, language, inside jokes and rules. Your kids have weirdly specific interests that take over your house for six months and then disappear. There are things you eat, places you always go and arguments you have so often everyone already knows their lines.

Most of it doesn’t seem particularly interesting while you’re living it. The bag with a broken pen, sticky hand, 3 hair clips, return address stickers you got free in the mail and 20 other things that your kid carries everywhere is just another thing you have to remember before leaving the house. The junk covering their dresser is clutter. The kid who always sits on the back of the couch is the kid you are constantly telling to sit right on the couch.

But I’m coming into your family from the outside and I notice that stuff. It’s actually one of my favorite things about photographing families. I get to help you step back and see the little systems you’ve built around each other that are so normal to you that you barely notice them anymore.

So what do we actually do during a documentary family session?

This is usually the next question. If I’m hanging out with you for a few hours and nobody is posing, what exactly are we supposed to be doing?

I ask all of my families what a typical weekend day looks like for them. Whether we are working together on a Saturday or not, looking at what you do when you have more freedom in your schedules is incredibly illuminating for me. We’ll probably make a loose plan. Maybe you make breakfast, play a game, walk to the park or get ice cream. But doing something is rarely the point of these sessions.

Choosing one or two activities for your session mostly answers the universal family photo question: What do I do with my hands? It gives your kids something to think about besides the fact that there is a photographer in their house and it gets everyone interacting naturally with each other very quickly. You have something to do, which means I can step back and watch because I don’t particularly need a photograph of you making pancakes.

I want what happens while you’re making pancakes.

I want the kid stealing chocolate chips, someone climbing onto the counter, the argument over who gets to stir and the look you give your partner when things start going slightly off the rails. The pancakes are a means to an end. They give us somewhere to put our hands while your family starts being your family.

Sometimes the pancakes matter too. Maybe Saturday morning pancakes really are your thing. Maybe you always walk to the same coffee shop after school drop off or your kids spend every afternoon building increasingly dangerous obstacles in the backyard. If that’s the case, then we get to document both the way your family interacts and the specific rituals that make up your life right now. Lucky you!

Ordinary doesn’t mean insignificant

I think we naturally reach for our cameras when something has already announced itself as important: birthdays, vacations, first days, holidays. Of course I want those photographs, I think most people do.

But so much of what eventually disappears never announces itself at all. It’s what kids’ bedrooms looked like, what they were obsessed with, where everyone sat at the table. It’s the snack they ate every day and how small they looked curled up in their usual spot on the couch. Eventually entire stretches of family life get reduced to, ‘Remember when you used to…?’ A single sentence or a fuzzy image lacking any detail pulled from the storage shed in the back of your brain. Photography gives us a way to hold onto some of it before memory edits everything down.

That’s why I don’t need your family to be more interesting for me. I don’t need you to invent an activity, clean up every trace of your actual life or suddenly become the kind of family that makes a full sitcom style breakfast spread on weekday mornings. I want to know what your family is like now.

I’m fascinated by the evidence of being human, all the strange, specific ways families live. The things that make us different and the things that reveal how much we’re all the same.

So if you’ve been putting off family photos because your house isn’t interesting enough, your kids won’t cooperate or you have absolutely no idea what we’d do together for a few hours, you can officially stop worrying about that part.