Michelle Caplan.

I keep stumbling across Michelle Caplan’s beautiful art and everytime,  the layers of meaning, and the stories in each portrait  cause me to stop and question the passing of time, while all at once needling me to find a way to record our lives in a way that goes someway to honouring our lives as a family without explicitly describing who we are…

In her bio, Michelle say’s…

"The portraits bring life to a families photographic history, each piece
with it’s own narrative; trying to the tell the story of the person
behind the image. It can represent a link to a families past and
provide a visual legacy for it’s future. A piece can capture a point in
time in the ever changing life of a child, or evoke the memory of a
beloved relative long past.
"

And that is what we need to do isn’t it? We don’t need to record every minute of every day the way digital photography allows us to do, we need instead to learn to peel back all that is ordinary and see what is real. To do away with hoping to find the essence of a person amongst a thousand pictures and instead re-think the way we view our lives: both the way they were and the way the truly are.

We need to learn to see.