Growing Humans

 

Growing Humans is an ongoing photographic study of childhood as it unfolds inside ordinary family life. Made over many years, the photographs follow children through the small rituals, experiments, injuries, negotiations, and absurdities of becoming themselves.

I am interested in the space between childhood as we remember it and childhood as it actually happens: physical, funny, vulnerable, unruly, and often unsentimental. A scraped knee, an inside joke, a hospital visit, a first attempt, a private disappointment—moments that seem inconsequential until, in retrospect, they become the evidence of growing up.

As the children have grown, the distance between photographer and subject has changed as well. Early childhood offered itself freely to the camera. Adolescence is more guarded. Bodies become self-conscious, relationships more complicated, and independence begins to replace dependence.

These photographs are not intended as a record of milestones. They are about what happens around them—the fleeting, unremarkable moments in which children are continually becoming someone they have never been before.