Portrait sessions for the version of you that doesn’t make it into photographs.
There are almost no photographs of you, thousands on your phone. Nearly none with you in them. That happened slowly, and it wasn’t a decision — but it is fixable.
You’ve been the one holding the camera. The one who says not today. The one who means to get around to it and then doesn’t, for a year, and then another one.
Meanwhile the people who love you would give a great deal for one good picture of your face. Not a flattering one. Just a true one.
You’ve been cropping yourself out of your OWN life.
Softer. Younger. Angled so the jaw does something it doesn’t do. The result is technically a photograph of you, and it isn’t you at all, and you can feel the difference even if you can’t name it. I work the other way. Long lenses, low light, very little direction. I’d rather wait forty minutes for the face you make when you forget you’re being photographed than spend forty minutes arranging one.
It means the sessions are slow. It means some frames are unflattering and stay in the gallery anyway, because unflattering and untrue are not the same thing.
Most portraits are trying to make you look like someone else.
Marguerite V.
Priya N.
Sunday Wellness
Elena R.
Every person here told me they hate having their picture taken. Usually in the first ten minutes. You’d never know it now.
portfolio
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Your gallery arrives in three weeks. You pick what you love and what nobody else ever sees. Prints and albums if you want them.
Gallery Curation
Two hours. Slow. You’ll be awkward for the first twenty minutes and then you’ll forget I’m there, which is when the good ones happen.
The session
A call, or coffee if you’re local. What you want. What you’re dreading. Where this is happening. Twenty minutes, no obligation.
We talk first
The Experience
KINFOLK / Darling / Monocle / The Gentlewoman
British Journal of Photography / ANTHOLOGY
Adaeze O.
I put off booking for three years. I spent the whole first hour apologizing for what my face was doing and the last hour forgetting to. My husband has one of them framed on his desk now.
Constance L.
I told her I wasn’t photogenic. She said that isn’t a real thing and kept shooting. She was right and I am so grateful for it.
Maren K.
I booked it because I turned forty and I was tired of not existing in my own photo albums. I’ve since sent the gallery to my mother, my sister, and one ex-boyfriend, which tells you everything.
I know what you’re going to do with your hands. I know you’ll apologize for your neck somewhere around minute ten. I’ve heard it several hundred times now and it has never once been true. What I do is mostly waiting. I’ll set the light, and then I’ll talk to you until you forget the camera is in the room, and somewhere in that forgetting is the photograph. It takes as long as it takes.
Fifteen years in Hudson, New York. Formerly a CFO, which explains the patience and the odd hours. Two dogs, a darkroom I don’t use enough, and a coffee order the shop starts making when I walk in.
I didn’t like having my picture taken either. That’s the whole reason I’m any good at this.
Sessions begin at $800
You don’t have to be ready. You don’t have to lose weight first, or grow your hair out, or wait for a better year. Those are just the reasons we give ourselves for waiting, and they’re very convincing, and they will still be here next year.
The photographs don’t exist yet. That’s the only problem here.
