I think people spend far more time thinking about what it feels like to be photographed than they do thinking about what happens afterward. Whether they’ll feel awkward, know what to do, or whether they’ll still recognize themselves in the images once they exist.
Most conversations around photography tend to live there—in the anticipation of the session itself. And it makes sense! Being photographed asks something unusual of us. Even for the people who are comfortable in front of a camera and enjoy having their portrait taken. They often arrive with a certain awareness of themselves and there is usually a brief period of adjusting—settling into the environment, noticing the camera, wondering what version of themselves will appear once the images are created.
But eventually, the session ends. Their anticipation ends. All the preparation ends. The appointments, planning, and conversations come to an end. And I don’t think any of those are actually the parts people remember most anyways.
What stays is rarely the memory of everything leading up to the session or even being in front of the camera itself. What actually remains are the photographs—and all of the places they quietly exist.
Not existing in an abstract way either. I am talking in actual places throughout your life. On the walls you pass every day. Inside an album that sits on your coffee table. On your website for the world to see. Or on someone’s desk. They become part of ordinary life in a way most people never expect—and then one day, without warning, they stop feeling ordinary at all.
Sure, there are images we take every day, but those seem to be the ones that disappear almost immediately. We send them. Save them. Scroll past them. They serve their purpose and then we move on because we seem to be documenting constantly now. Thousands of photographs are being made every day, and because of that, it becomes easier to confuse having images with actually choosing them.
But then there are photographs that somehow continue to live on well past the scroll. Not because they are technically perfect. Not because they are dramatic. And not even because they captured an extraordinary moment. They stop functioning as documentation and start becoming reference points. Not because we return to them constantly, but because they quietly become part of how we remember a season, understand a relationship, or recognize who we were becoming at the time.
There’s a difference between recording something and creating something that remains.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot more lately. Not because I think all photographs should feel heavy or overly important. Most of life is ordinary, and I think there’s something incredibly beautiful about that. But photographs have always interested me because they have the potential to become more meaningful over time, not less.
Think about it, after all of the thought that went into creating your images, there is something that quietly begins happening most people never really consider. I don’t mean permanence in the dramatic sense. I mean that photographs continue participating in our lives long after the experience of taking them has faded. Sometimes they become important simply because they stayed close enough to our lives for long enough that they gathered meaning.
That’s the part I think people underestimate. A photograph rarely becomes valuable on the day it’s taken. Even when they feel ordinary at the time, they quietly influence what we hold onto and what fades. Because photographs are rarely neutral. Those images become valuable later. When circumstances of life change—children grow, businesses evolve, relationships deepen, or the version of ourselves in the image quietly becomes someone we no longer are. That’s when we return to our photographs differently.
Not to see what happened. Not because they tell people who we are—but because they become part of how people remember us and to remind us what it felt like to live inside that season. That feels especially important to me in a time where most images are created quickly and consumed even faster. And because portraits are often dismissed as vanity or treated only as visual updates.
But I’ve never experienced any imagery that way. Portraits are interpretations and don’t only represent what someone looked like that year.
A family portrait eventually stops being about matching outfits and starts becoming evidence that everyone was there. A boudoir image often becomes less about how someone looked and more about remembering how it felt to occupy their own life in that season. A branding image eventually stops being about looking professional and starts becoming part of how trust is formed. It becomes the photograph attached to introductions, opportunities, conversations, and first impressions long after the session itself has been forgotten.
There are changes we should consider when choosing a portrait experience in the first place. Not from a place of pressure, but from a place of consideration. Because if a photograph will eventually become part of how a season is remembered, then maybe the question isn’t whether the image will look good. Instead, the better question is: Will this still feel true later in life?
I think that’s the difference I keep returning to. Not whether a photograph is beautiful. But whether it still feels worth returning to once the moment itself has passed.