I have this reoccurring daydream of our life of adventures and everyday stories being documented in print. A dusty shelf filled with albums, actual artifacts saying we were here, and we loved.
Think about the alternative. When you are old, and sitting in your rocking chairs on the porch swing, what do you imagine? Pulling out your iPhone to flip through the "see friendship" section of your facebook accounts? What will you pass along? An instagram account full of the plates of food and fancy lattes you drank? Of course we may all have the big moments saved (and if you are lucky, printed); graduations and wedding days, new babies and maybe some posed family portraits in the form of Christmas cards. But where is the real stuff of the heart?
I wanted to capture our first vacation together by getting both of us in the frame. I have for a long time admired the work of Ashley Jennett and the way she so seemly effortlessly captures moments with so much real life inside of them. With little to no directing, she invites you to own the space within her frames, which translates into images that feel so completely natural. I love that I have images of my uncombed hair (mostly because I forgot to pack a brush), my makeup free face, bra-less everyday self being loved right up close by (my much more modest and more put together) husband. Then I danced around in a flowy wind-blown dress with a crown of flowers, and we smushed our faces close and laughed and whispered cute things in each others ears, then snuggled close while watching the sunset from a mountain top, and we felt completely filled up by the beauty of it all.
More so, I love the secrets this album will teach us later. When we brush the dust of the cover, read California and run our hands over the pages and remember details we didn't know would matter. There are a lot of images that I am not sharing here, mostly because they hold such a big, honest peice of my heart that I only want held within intimate book pages and by the ones I love. But I share these because I would love to invite you to find ways to create artifacts of your life, to think about what you will have to hold onto to remember, what is worth preserving so that you won't forget.
All images by photographer Ashley Jennett, The Stork and the Beanstock
