Abbotsford Family Photographer | Why “Hidden Lives”? | Hidden Lives Photography

One question I’ve been asked is, why the name “Hidden Lives Photography”? It’s a bit out of the norm, for sure, and perhaps it would be wiser in the long run to change it, but for me, it’s an important way to remind myself and my clients of my particular vision and approach to photography.

The name comes from a favorite quote of mine, from George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch: 

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

I love this quote so much because it highlights an essential and everyday truth for humanity that is easily forgotten and underestimated: that the ordinary ways of our being and loving are so powerful, fruitful, and infinitely impactful to those around us and beyond us. That the ordinary realities of birth, childhood, love and marriage carry such weight and incalculable beauty within their simplicity. In fact, it is so ordinary, that oftentimes its extraordinary dimension is overlooked, or “hidden”, as it were. 

This idea always intrigues me when it comes to my photography, which for me, is to try to make visible that extraordinary dimension that can often be hidden to ourselves and others, whether that be in memory or wider recognition. Beautiful photography, to me at least, is never merely literal on one hand or purely aesthetic on the other. Instead, I think truly beautiful photography is when you’re capturing the person before you in an authentic way that also tries to make visible — or take out of hiding — that dimension of this moment in their life that is intangibly and extraordinarily beautiful and meaningful. I don’t know if my work fully lives up to that vision, but it is what moves and animates how I photograph the people I’ve been given. 

This the vision, captured in the words “hidden lives”, that inspires my work and explains why and how I approach these important moments in life — birth, childhood, marriage and family — the way that I do. I want you to see and celebrate how beautiful and important your seemingly ordinary life truly is.