I was thinking about my mom today. Not in the melancholy, grief-stained kind of way—but in that everyday, unexpected way that catches you mid-step, mid-scroll, mid-sip of coffee. I was organizing some photos, the digital kind, trying to give shape and structure to the visual chaos that lives inside my iPhone camera roll. And then I thought of her. My mom, the self-appointed family photographer. Not because she was particularly gifted. Lord knows she wasn’t. She had no sense of composition, no feel for light, no interest in rule of thirds or subject isolation or any of the things I now obsess about as a professional photographer.
But what she lacked in style or flare, she made up for with sheer will. Tireless, dutiful, almost obsessive. She showed up with her Instamatic camera, rolls of Kodak film, and that relentless commitment to document everything. Holidays, birthdays, school dances, family trips, barbecues, baby baths, graduation ceremonies, bad perms, awkward braces, and even more awkward mustaches. She was the kind of photographer who didn’t just take pictures. She made albums. She printed doubles. She labeled backs with dates, names, and places. She put them in shoeboxes, in manila envelopes, in photo-safe sleeves tucked into three-ring binders. It wasn’t art. It was archive.
She didn’t have creative propensities. She wasn’t wired that way.
And growing up in her shadow, neither was I.
If creativity was genetic, I figured I had inherited the recessive genes. I couldn’t draw. Couldn’t paint. Couldn’t write. I was a plain old duffass when it came to anything artistic. The best I could do was keep my handwriting legible and remember to underline book titles in essays. For most of my early life, I would’ve laughed if you’d told me I’d grow up to be a visual artist of any kind.
But that’s the funny thing about creative embers—they can smolder quietly, unseen, unfelt, for decades. And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the flame catches. And suddenly it’s not a flicker. It’s a goddamn wildfire.
That’s what happened to me. I can’t pinpoint the moment, but somewhere along the way—maybe in my 20s,—my eyes changed. I began seeing things. Noticing light. Framing moments. Feeling something stir inside me when I captured a sliver of time and space and held it still. What had once felt awkward and inaccessible suddenly became instinctive and necessary. Photography, for me, wasn’t just about the images. It was about meaning. It was a way to say: This mattered. This moment existed. We were here.
Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what my mom was saying with her camera all those years.
She never would’ve put it like that, of course. She wouldn’t have used words like “meaning” or “presence” or “narrative.” But I know now—deeply, tenderly—that the motivation behind her photo-taking was love. Plain and simple. She was preserving our lives, one click at a time. She was showing up in the way she knew how. Her camera wasn’t a creative instrument; it was an emotional one. A tool for memory, for connection, for legacy.
When I show you photos—like the ones I post here or include in my books or teach in my courses—I’m channeling the same impulse. I may have fancier tools. I may shoot on iPhones with 48MP sensors and edit with professional apps and talk endlessly about light and composition and focal length. But the root is the same.
Love. Moments. Presence. Tenderness. Story. Family. Memory.
Those aren’t photography terms. They’re human ones.
And sometimes I wish—achingly—that my mom was still around so I could sit beside her and show off my family albums. Not the digital ones. Not the ones on social media. The real ones. The printed ones. The curated ones. The ones I’ve poured my heart into. I’d sit next to her on the couch, the way we used to sit and look through hers, and I’d say, “Look, Mom. I got the bug. It finally caught me. I’m one of you now.”
She’d probably cry. She always cried at sweet things. And I think she’d be proud. Not because I became a photographer. But because I became a rememberer—like she was.
You see, my mom wasn’t interested in perfect photos. She was interested in proof. Proof that we laughed. That we gathered. That we grew. That we made it through. That we loved each other, even when we didn’t say it out loud.
I try to carry that spirit with me, even now. Especially now. In a world where photography often gets tangled up in filters, likes, algorithms, and perfectionism, I remind myself that the core of it—at least for me—is memory. Emotion. Soul.
The truth is, if you had flipped through one of my mom’s photo albums, you wouldn’t have been wowed by artistry. But you’d have felt something. The way a good photo should make you feel. You’d see a life. A family. A throughline of care.
And that’s the inheritance I’m most grateful for. Not a trust fund. Not fine china or antique furniture or pearls passed down from her mother’s mother. I got something better.
I got the eye. Not the technical eye. The emotional one.
And it started with her. With her terrible compositions, her clumsy cropping, her relentless archiving, her endless labeling. She gave me a map. A map of our family. A map of love. And somewhere along the road, I picked up the torch. I didn’t even know I was holding it until it started to glow.
So if you ever wonder why I’m so obsessed with photography… why I talk about it like it’s a spiritual practice… why I evangelize for printing your damn photos and sharing them and saving them and treasuring them—this is why.
Because a photo is more than an image. It’s a legacy. A time capsule. A love letter in visual form.
Thanks, Mom.
I finally get it.
Click.
Jack.
