Exposure 05: Family Portraits

It took months of convincing, but it happened: I convinced my family to get in front of the lens.

Taking photos of my mom in Utah sparked an excitement to capture more portraits of my family. Over a year after that Park City trip, I saw my family back in St. Louis for a wedding. That weekend began a project exploring my family’s history and identity, creating and curating under the working title “Midwest Heart, Southern Soul, Western Spirit.” It might’ve taken some love and convincing (a lot of me begging), and my brother, dad and mom agreed to let me photograph them. I had maybe 5 minutes with each of them before I lost their interest.¹

This ongoing portrait project is a meditation on identity, inheritance, and the fluidity of belonging. Rooted in my own journey—growing up in the Midwest, studying in the deep South, and now making a home in Denver—I find myself tracing the lines of family, place, and transformation often. These images are about the people we become through love, geography, and the objects we inherit. They are about the ways we carry home with us, even as we redefine what home means.

My husband wears my dad’s cowboy hat; my mom wear’s my little brother’s. My little brother Jack wears his university t-shirt, a nod to my brothers’ new home town in Fort Worth and to St. Louis with its Budweiser-inspired design. My dad wears his Olwig family t-shirt, a commemoration to the farm they used to own. Another Budweiser-inspired design. With two brothers in Texas, cowboy hats have become a normal accessory for them. In this series, the cowboy hats serve as a symbol of adoption, of movement and migration, the American spirit. It plays into the traditional meaning of a cowboy hat, too: cultural exchange, connection to land and rugged individualism. More clues to the places that form us.

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1. I actually think my little brother loved it, but I don’t think he’d let me show you the photo proof that he did. He got creative in his posing.