Lately I have really been struggling with defining my style of photography. I’m not sure why but I feel like I have to choose between either a documentary style or family lifestyle. One being a little more real and the other a bit more controlled, more posed. It’s been a frustration. As I have been on this journey for the last four years I’ve heard over and over that your style needs to be consistent. So if you look at my instagram page you’ll see documentary photos mixed in with dreamy, cuddly photos with magic light. It feels like everything but consistent, but I’m in love with both.I despise phoniness, I have as long as I can remember. Life isn’t perfect and I don’t like to pretend that it is. So a photo of a kid with a dirty shirt staring down the barrel of the camera with a grumpy face or the day to day shot of children still playing in their jammies at noon is beautiful to me. But a husband embracing his wife in dreamy light or a baby peacefully resting on his mama’s shoulder in a field of wild flowers also makes me swoon. It’s a tension I struggle with, I want to both.But I as I have been grappling with this tension I’m realizing this longing for both styles has taken it’s own voice, it’s own style. My style vision. The way I see things. And I’m learning to love and embrace my vision. I just need to start trusting it. Trust that the truth of what I see are beautiful, are real. It hit me last night when I was watching a rerun of This Is Us (my faaaavorite show). One of the characters, William is sick and dying and this woman asked him what it was like to die. His response put it together for me:

“It feels like all these beautiful pieces of life are flying around me and I’m trying to catch them. When my granddaughter falls asleep on my lap, I try to catch the feeling of her breathing against me. When I make my son laugh, I try to catch the sound of him laughing, as it rolls up from his chest. But the pieces are moving faster now and I can’t catch them all. I can feel them slipping through my fingertips. And soon where there used to be my granddaughter breathing and my son laughing, there will be nothing.”

-William, This is UsThere is so much truth and beauty wrapped up in his words. There is light and dark in his story. The beauty of his love for his family and the truth of loss and sadness. It’s truthful and yet beautiful. That’s what I want, that’s where I am.

I think what I have figured out is, beauty is not defined by a fashionable dress, styled hair, a perfect looking family with perfect looking smiles. For me, it’s defined by the human interactions of loved ones, the way light and shadow play with one another, it’s bittersweet, melancholy, and just plain love. And somewhere in that truth and beauty, sit my images and how I see the world, my family and yours.