Family. summer water story, blairgowrie.

To be really honest, it’s not that hard to capture what things look like.

What is harder, and what is eminently more precious, is to try to create a record of how they felt.

In these longer family sessions, when the evening hours feel languorous and slow, in a location which is not a ‘location’ but the setting of an experience, and when we have time to actually drop in to that experience, and let go of any desire to perform or create a certain outcome, then we invite true emotion, that magical unicorn of photographic record, to enter the space.

Real feeling can’t be manufactured or produced upon demand, it has to be lived. And in these times of AI and the cult of perfection pervading more and more life, do we really want it to?

It is like the difference between being and doing. And i suspect it might also be the difference between photographs that dance back and forth between memory and art, and those that, lovely as they might look, could really belong to anyone else.