Telling a Moving Story, by Ben Lipford
Meet the Grasso family. Though I first started documenting their family with the birth of their youngest daughter Izzie in late 2019, I’ve known Joshua for many years. He’s a fantastic wedding photographer—though I might be biased since he shot my own wedding.
Telling stories in long form through photography has always been on my bucket list, and when I launched my Year in the Life sessions the Grassos were eager to jump on board. They had no idea what the year would have in store for them.
There were, of course, the familiar moments we documentary photographers work to capture in all of our photos. Tired mornings, daily routines, trying to get the kids to eat dinner— the seemingly ordinary happenings that become extraordinary when frozen in time. And then, in a surprising interruption to their normal, the family decided to move.
Moving a whole family is, well, an experience. It’s not something that happens in a day. First comes the packing and saying goodbye to the home they’ve known, and then the moving truck rolls up. For weeks, regardless of holidays, you live out of boxes. Sometimes the fridge doesn’t come and you have to eat pizza for a month!
Slowly, pictures get hung. Flowers get planted. Over time, a house becomes a home.
Life happens in the big and small moments. Sometimes it changes in the blink of an eye, and sometimes it takes an entire year or more. It can be hard to tell the story in just one day. And that’s what’s special about photographing a family over the course of a year. It gives you the opportunity to tell a chapter in a story that’s always unfolding.
Check out Ben’s course “Telling Year-Long Family Stories” available now on the DFP Education Library!