My friend Jim and his high-school-aged daughter Leah recently asked if I would do Leah’s senior pictures, and I must admit that my reaction was flattered hesitancy.
I was flattered because I know that a kid’s senior picture is a fairly big deal (Example: My Mom still has my senior picture out on display in her house, nearly 40 years after the picture was taken.) The hesitancy resulted because I’ve seen how some photographers shoot senior pictures these days: The girls often look like super-sexy models and the boys, sometimes photographed shirtless, look like boy toy pop stars. Stage-managed images like that are not my photographic style.
Over the years I’ve taken a number of pictures of my friend and his daughter when their family has visited here...just casual, we’re-on-vacation-and-we-met-a-chicken kinds of snaps. Doing Leah’s senior pictures prompted me to dig back through my albums of black and white images, prints that I made by hand in my own darkroom.
The common thread that I see between the old black-and-whites and the recent senior pictures is, I hope, a certain sweetness.
Looking at these pictures, I must also add that the years, oh they do fly by so very quickly.
