The photographers doc their households
Four photographers tell us why they wanted to document their families and the joys and pitfalls associated with them
For a photographer, working with the family can be both beneficial and challenging. On the one hand, you have a group of subjects that you are familiar with and that (hopefully) feel so comfortable that the camera doesn't bother them. It's an instant ticket to intimacy when done right. On the other hand, this intimacy is personal and if you focus your work on the people who are closest to you it can potentially change the dynamics and feelings of those involved and thus disrupt family life.
To understand how it's done well, CR speaks to four photographers who have documented their families for many years, which has led them to create a deeply personal work on commonly perceived subjects. Here they tell us what they learned from photographing loved ones, how it informed their other projects, and what it feels like to bring something so personal into the world.
Above and above: Heartbeats from Juuso Westerlund
JUUSO WESTERLUND
Photographer Juuso Westerlund lives in Helsinki, Finland and works on both commercial and personal projects. His ongoing Heartbeats series evolved from the family album pictures he made into something more significant the day his children were born. "In the beginning it was about answering questions that are fundamental to the human experience and whose answers we may have lost with age," explains Westerlund. “All of the images in the Heartbeats series resemble a single image. The pictures are like poems, visual poems that I can't write. Poems about childhood, longing, innocence, vulnerability, mortality. "
Creative process photography