The Session That Took Three Years to Happen
Session Stories
When Nancy first reached out, her mother Emma was already 102 years old. Emma had been taking her granddaughter Megan to Taylor’s Ice Cream Parlor in Chester, New Jersey since Megan was about six. Every summer. A grandmother-granddaughter routine, the kind that sticks. Now Megan was grown and they wanted to go back to that same place, all three generations, and photograph what that meant.
The concept was clear. The location was specific and non-negotiable. It had to be Taylor’s, because that was the place.
Then Hurricane Sandy arrived and pushed everything back. Then the parlor burned to the ground.
That second one was harder than the first. A hurricane is a force of nature and you wait it out. But losing the location itself, the actual place where those summers had happened, meant losing the whole premise. You can’t recreate a memory at a different ice cream shop. It doesn’t work that way.
I reached out to the new owners.
I don’t know exactly what I expected. A polite no, maybe, or a request to book through normal channels. What I got was the opposite. They were genuinely excited. They knew the history of the place, they understood what the family was trying to do, and they wanted to be part of it.
On the day of the session, the owners made a cake for Emma. Their family showed up too. One photograph from that afternoon that includes the owners alongside the Healys, people who had never met before that morning, together in the frame because a 102-year-old woman had been coming in for vanilla in a sugar cone since before most of us were born.
What I did before I showed them the images.
While we were setting up that afternoon, I filmed them. I let Emma and Megan just talk, and I pointed a camera at them while they did. I wasn’t asking specific questions, just letting the conversation go where it went. Emma talked about the summers. Megan talked about her grandmother. You can hear in both of their voices what these ice cream dates had actually meant.
When I came to their home for the ordering appointment, I opened with that video.
The family watched themselves on the screen, laughing at the same stories they’d just heard in person weeks earlier. That’s what I mean when I say the reveal matters as much as the session. The images are one thing. But watching your family talk about your family, in their own words, before you’ve seen a single print, changes what happens when the portraits come up on screen.
The video is still on YouTube. You can watch it below.
Then Nancy wrote me a letter.
A few weeks after the ordering appointment, I received a two-page letter from Nancy. Not an email, not a review. A letter. I sat with it for a while before I knew what to do with it. I’ve shared it here, unedited, because I don’t think I could have written a better description of what I try to do, or why I do it.
Dear Anthony,
There are many things I would like to share with you regarding our work together. First, rather than WORK, this was a true journey... one that began nearly 3 years ago!!
I must admit that I was quite skeptical at first engaging in another family "portrait" since the last one was not at all what it portended to be. Indeed, though this competitor does a brisk business, the result was not the warm family photo we had anticipated. So when you came into our lives and our family room and took a long time to get to know us, I felt as if we were finally on the right path. In fact, the first leg of our journey together seemed to herald a bright future and a beautiful ending.
Alas!! Along came Hurricane Sandy and suddenly life, as many of us knew it changed. Happily, for you, it meant the birth of your beautiful daughter and the rebirth of your business in another location! And, to your credit, you never lost sight of those with whom you had established a vision. So you persisted and when the site of our anticipated shoot burned to the ground and took a year to rebuild, you remained calm and attentive to our desire to have the shoot take place here, at this particular place, since it held so much meaning and sentiment for us.
Your personal interest exceeded that of "vendor and client". YOU took the time to establish a working relationship with the owners of the shop. YOU set the date for the session when you are usually at home with your family. YOU were attentive and in tune with our needs of safety for EMMA and a trusting environment for MEG, who dislikes her picture being taken. YOU were the one who talked us through it, said all the right things to put everyone at ease, made us laugh and chat and smile as you skillfully and artfully caught it all on camera!! And YOU were the one who kept repeating how we needed all three generations of women in the photo... soooo many thanks for all these things!!!
Nearly three years after our first meeting, you again came into our home and patiently took us through the results of that session. You shared stories of your family with us and listened to ours in return. It was impossible to select only one photo from all those you had taken... so you suggested a collage of images... a perfect solution! Then you sent us a priceless YouTube video as a prelude to the final images. I cannot tell you how many "likes" that YouTube has received and how many comments it has generated.
So now, our long awaited family collage is here. In it the bond between Grandmother and Granddaughter is immediately understood. Their love and acceptance of one another needs no verbal explanation. It is all right here for all to see and enjoy. Your "pictures" will tell their story to future generations.
I thank you for your kindness and humor, your steadfastness and respectfulness. As an artist, I thank you for the artistry in your photography and your mindfulness of even the smallest detail. Finally, as the woman representing the second generation, I thank you for urging me to “at least get in one” photograph!!!
Most appreciatively,
Nancy Healy, Chester, NJ
The photograph they chose.
Emma F. Spolizino was born July 10, 1912. She passed December 28, 2016, at 104 years old.
Her family chose one of the portraits from that afternoon, Emma alone, happy, in the middle of her ice cream, as the image for her funeral and memorial page. They asked for the YouTube video to play at the service.
I didn’t know any of that was coming when I filmed her talking about the summers she spent with her granddaughter. I was just trying to capture what was actually there. That’s always the goal, in every session. But some photographs carry more than you planned.
This one is why I do this work.
You can see the full portrait story on the Healy Family client story page.
Legacy portraits don’t happen by accident.
They happen when someone commits to making them. Let’s talk about yours.
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