Vancouver Children’s Portraits That Endure

January 6, 2008 |

Children’s Portraits by Julia Pelish.

If you’re like me, you have close friends and family who send out the cutest, messiest, most candid photographs of their young kids. They usually arrive as attachments in email and many turn out to be hilarious. How can you not burst out laughing at the sight of your two-year-old niece’s plump face covered in Gerber applesauce?

Those photos are adorable and the ones that end up being kept will one day be great blackmail material when the kids turn into ultracool teenagers. But the thing I don’t see much of any more are hard copies of those pictures. As we transfer more and more of our lives to the virtual world, we lose the scrapbooks and boxes full of snapshots that so many of us have had as keepsakes.

We erase our digital cards and those shots are lost. We clean out our email folders and the memories with them. We fill up our hard drives with new photos and the old ones get shunned into the “trash”.

Recently I’ve seen an increase in the number of moms and dads contacting me for portraits of their kids and I wonder if it’s not because we’re seeking to stop the gradual erosion of permanence. To visitors to our homes, beautiful portraits in an attractive frame are decorative talking pieces, but to the parents they’re precious keepsakes. Being able to freeze time has fascinated me from the first time I took a photograph for this reason. The more portraits I take of kids, the more I realize how special it is to be able to capture their images in a studio or location setting. It’s true - they grow up quick. In a way, pictures keep them young; preserving not only their image but our time spent with them when they’re so innocent.

Vancouver, of course, offers many wonderful opportunities to take children’s portraits. Granville Island, Stanley Park and Spanish Banks are always winning locations for a Vancouver family portrait. Children are also very comfortable in their own homes and some of my best shots have been in that setting. The photo above was taken in my Yaletown home studio. I hope you can see what I mean about how precious a photograph of a child can be.