Why were digital galleries never enough for me?

Nikki’s Narrative has always been about more than taking nice pictures and sending someone a download link, although that is how it worked for quite a while, while I got my bearings.

But let’s get real here…  

We all have thousands of pictures sitting on our phones. Name one person who goes through their photos regularly? I’ll wait…  You see, eventually our storage fills up, we back everything up somewhere online, and then most of those photos are barely looked at again, if ever. 

That has never been how my family treated pictures.

We have totes and totes of family pictures from different years and generations. My sisters and I love sitting down and going through them. We tell stories about what we remember, laugh at each other, repeat the same jokes, and relive pieces of our childhood over and over again. It’s honestly one of my favorite things to do with my family. Even the rough times, the sad times, and the exciting times are all inside those totes, filled to the brim. We always wished we had a better way to showcase them, but throwing them online, or taking photos of them with our phones never seemed to change the fact, they were forgotten as quickly as we had found them. There they stay, waiting for the next time us sisters feel like going down memory lane. My daddy was clever enough to take so many photos and home videos while we were growing up, and I cannot explain how much I cherish having them now.

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Even my own children, who are barely teenagers, already love going through their baby pictures and videos from when they were little. They ask questions, tell stories they barely remember, and laugh at themselves and each other.

That is what I want the families I photograph to have. This is what I hope they look back on and realize the value of what they have.

I want to create art that is actually present in their homes. Photographs they walk past every day, albums they can pull out, pieces they can add to over the years, and memories they can eventually pass down.

Photos can last a lifetime when they are done and preserved well.

The stories attached to them can last even longer.

I also don’t want every person who sees one of my images to feel the exact same thing.

I want them to feel whatever they feel.

I want someone to look at a photograph and create their own story around it. I want the image to leave enough room for imagination. What one person sees as beautiful might feel haunting to someone else. Someone might see strength where another person sees sadness.

That is part of why I love creating conceptual and cinematic work. I can build the scene, but I don’t have to decide exactly what it means for everyone else.