Some Stories Take Years to Tell

Six years, four sessions, and a whole lot of life in between.



In 2020, I was 18 years old, newly charging people actual money to take their photos, and had absolutely no idea that I was about to meet someone whose life I would still be photographing six years later.

It was the middle of covid, andI had driven from Philadelphia back home to Arizona for quarantine and, somewhere in that strange stretch of time, started taking on some of my first paid sessions. I photographed a family friend, she told a coworker about me, and that coworker was Shruti.

Shruti and I met for the first time out in a wash in the Arizona desert. I remember being so nervous because she was my first client I didn't personally know. I was there to take some solo portraits of her. At the time, that's all I thought they were.  Years later, she told me she'd actually wanted those photos for her dating profile, which makes everything that happened afterward feel a little bit magical.

From dating profiles to wedding days

A couple years passed before Shruti reached out again, this time asking me to photograph an in-home boudoir session for her. Then, eventually, I got another message: *I'm getting married, and I can't imagine anyone else doing this but you.*

By then, photography had taken me all over the place. I had finished college, I was working seasonally in Alaska, and I was preparing to make the move there permanently. But there was one last thing I needed to stay in Arizona for: Shruti's wedding.

Their wedding wasn't just a single ceremony or a few hours of photographs. It was an entire weekend built intentionally around their families, cultures and community. We photographed a Christian ceremony, followed by a puja prayer that evening, and then a Hindu ceremony the next day. It was colorful and joyful and layered with tradition, but what I remember most is how much the entire weekend felt like *them*. The people they loved weren't just there to watch them get married; they were woven into the celebration.

It ended up being the last thing I photographed before permanently moving to Alaska. Then life kept moving.

"Any way you're going to be home?"

Earlier this year, I got another text from Shruti. She was pregnant, and she asked if there was any chance I'd be coming home because she would love for me to photograph her maternity photos.

I wanted to immediately say yes, but Arizona is a very long way from Alaska, and at the time I genuinely didn't know if I could make the trip work. A few months later she checked in again, this time asking if I knew any local photographers I could recommend.

The problem was...I really didn't.  I hadn't spent enough of my adult photography career in Arizona to have a list of people I knew and trusted. I was talking about it with my husband, Max, when he said something incredibly simple: "Why don't you just go?"

So I did.

What started as flying to Arizona for one maternity session turned into a little family trip at exactly the right time. My sister flew in from North Carolina with her baby, Max came with me, and suddenly this photography trip became an excuse to have my own family together for a few days too.

Six years after meeting Shruti in that wash, I got to photograph her again. This time, waiting for the baby she and the person from those dating-profile days were about to have.

Back in her home

There was a moment during this session that I don't think I'll forget. I walked into Shruti's house and started noticing pieces of her wedding everywhere. Things from the celebration had become decorations in their living room, their wedding photographs were hanging throughout their home, and at one point she pulled out the wedding album and showed it to me.

Suddenly I was standing inside a life I'd gotten to document pieces of for six years.

That's a strange and wonderful thing to experience as a photographer. When you're delivering a gallery, you're so focused on the photographs themselves. You edit them, send them away, maybe share a few online, and eventually move on to the next story. You don't always get to see what happens to those photographs afterward.

But here they were. They had become part of the house.

And now that same house was changing again. There was a crib waiting in another room. Children's books were stacked on a shelf. Ultrasound pictures were being passed around. I was surprised to see she got two dogs since the last time I had seen her. They wore little big-brother bandanas and inserted themselves into nearly every photograph we attempted.

So that's what we photographed. We didn't need to turn her maternity session into something elaborate. We spent time in their home, sat on the rugs, played with the dogs, looked at ultrasound pictures and wandered outside their home. We photographed what their life looked like right before it changed again.

Six years later

I think one of the biggest ways I've changed since I photographed Shruti at 18 is that I'm much less interested in creating a "perfect" photograph. I want beautiful photographs, obviously. I'm still a photographer.

But what I'm really interested in now is evidence of a life being lived.

The dog under your feet, the rug you picked for your living room, the paintings on your walls and the cactus outside your house. The way your partner looks at you. The ultrasound strip you're carrying around because somehow those tiny little pictures already mean everything. The empty crib before there was ever a baby sleeping inside it. All of the completely ordinary things that don't feel particularly important while they're happening, until one day they are.

And maybe that's why photographing Shruti again meant so much to me.

When I met her, I was an 18-year-old photographer trying to figure out how to turn something I loved into an actual job. I had no idea where photography would take me. She was someone who had been referred to me by a family friend, and we met in the desert and took some pictures.

Six years later, I've photographed her portraits, her boudoir session, her wedding weekend and now her pregnancy. I've moved across the country. My work has changed. I've changed. Her life has changed too.

And somehow, every few years, our stories meet again and I get to pick up my camera and document what this particular chapter looked like.

I don't think 18-year-old me understood that this could be part of being a photographer. That sometimes you don't just photograph someone once. Sometimes they invite you back.

And if you're really lucky, you get to watch their life unfold.