Photo Essay:

Family and Child Portraiture 

Story and photos by Lorryn Smit 

When you ask people what possessions they would rescue from their burning house, one of the most frequent answers is the photograph album, or nowadays, a computer with their digital images. When in panic mode it is interesting that we would probably grab photos rather than valuable jewelry. This impulse to save our recorded memories is the driving force behind our constant desire to transform our most precious moments into images. We want to preserve the important events and people in our lives. The ceremonies of birth and birthdays, marriages and anniversaries, holidays and new houses are all recorded because they matter.

As I was packing my bags the night before my flight to Korea, I was searching the house for photos of my family that I could take with me and while I found a few, none of them were beautiful. Not one of them touched me emotionally like a beautifully composed picture would and at that moment I wished that we had a professional come to document our lives together in a beautiful and unique way.

This regret has stayed with me since that day and is probably why I feel so strongly about people having themselves beautifully and professionally documented, not only for themselves, but also for their children and their family. Yes, we have swanky phone cameras now that enable us to take photos of babies first steps or selfies with our friends but these photos get uploaded to social media and disappear into the masses never to be printed or looked at again. They are great fillers for our life stories, but in the end we need the highlights to be documented in an exquisite way.

When I am photographing a family I will always be thinking of how the child is going to feel when they look at the pictures. I feel that my job is to create and make the image look like a safe holding space for the child(ren) where they are safe and protected. These images are one of the few things of a childhood that parents are able to preserve for them so when they look back on their memories, I want them to feel loved, cherished and most importantly a sense of belonging.

I also do everything I can to make the photo session in itself a bonding and memorable experience for the family. The experience itself is just as important as the actual product that I deliver. My hope is that I can create a time where mom and dad can step out of the daily hustle and have two hours to admire their children and reconnect with each other as partners and as a family.

Something happens to us when we see pictures of our families. We well up with pride and want to show people; we travel back in time and can see and feel details long forgotten; we are reminded of what matters and how time moves too quickly, and to treasure the moments we have today.

Pictures, like memories and stories, are part of our legacy. We hold them close, we pass them down. It is a gift to be able to share a visual of moments, details, people, places and things to those we love, so that they, too, can feel even a glimmer of the joy we feel when we reflect on those times.

To see more of my work you can visit www.lorrynsmit.photography/blog