Facebook’s Black and White Challenge, to post a black and white image for five days, prompted me to look at pictures I took of my family 15 and 20 years ago. It felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and suddenly realizing that two separate sections actually fit together. I was surprised to see the connections between the old photographs and the ones I’ve taken recently. The early photos show my family in transition; my parents were recently divorced and my dad remarried, my siblings were teenagers and becoming young adults. I didn’t photograph my family for several years because living far away, and having young children, didn’t allow the time and space to step outside situations and photograph them. The new images made me aware of the cliches: how quickly time passes, how much things change and how much things stay the same. They show my dad and his young daughter, their family celebrating Christmas eve at my mom’s house, my mom vacationing with his family and ours, and my children. The biggest discovery was seeing how similar my self-portrait is to the photograph of my mom I made two decades earlier.
