Some of the most important photographs of your child's life happen in the first few days home, and almost nobody takes them.
I photographed Alec this week, just days after he and Maryam got home. Thirty minutes, in their bedroom, in the light that was already there. She was in her pyjamas. She didn't change a thing, and that was the point.
Here's what I've come to believe after years of this. There's a newborn session everyone knows about, the settled one, a few weeks in, when the house is calmer and everyone has had some sleep. That session is lovely and I do a lot of them. But it isn't these days. These days, the very first ones, look and feel like nothing else, and they're gone in about a week.
The feeding at the edge of the bed. The way you hold a baby who is still brand new to you. Your own body still carrying the pregnancy. The tiredness. People treat the tiredness like something to hide or wait out, and I understand why, but it's part of the truth of this stage, and in a photograph it doesn't read as tired. It reads as the deep, ordinary work of loving someone this new.
This session is one part of a longer story. I did Maryam's maternity shoot, this is Alec's first days, and there'll be another when he's a little older and settled, maybe a first birthday. Several shoots covering the journey, one album. That's the album I want to be making, the one that holds the whole beginning rather than a single afternoon.
Maryam has one of these as her profile picture now... that says it all.
If you're expecting a baby in Hamilton and you want the first days home in your album, not just the tidy weeks after, talk to me before the birth so we can plan for it, along with your maternity shoot.
— Tony
