Family Photos
Family photos are by definition personal and their purpose is to be memory sakes, not "good" pictures. Says who?
I am guilty of that preconception, but how wrong have I been all along. Just look at Nobuyoshi Araki's "Sentimental Journey", shooting his wife. Or at what Nicholas Nixon has achieved with his series of portraits of his wife and her three sisters, taken over the course of 40 years. He's a master portraitist and these hardly fit the "family album" type candid photos that most of us take (or later regret not having taken, if we did not). But still...
The point is, we can have the cake and eat it too. Nothing prevents us from applying to our personal visual memories the same care and vision that we use to make our "portfolio" work. Which by the way also helps exercising our skills, especially when our subject is a never-still two-year old energy ball. And, most importantly, will leave us with images that mean more, to us, than many others we take as part of our "work".
Thank you, Leonardo, for being my subject during two whole days in Brussels. And thank you, Iris and Pierre, for making him the fun little boy that he is.
