Every year for the past three years, my little sister and I have a date. We have a date to take her portrait. It started as a fun thing to do as a girls day, but as my photography skills have improved and I have learned to capture people, it has become a hallmark event in my year. In 2018, it was her golden birthday where she turned the same age as the day she was born on. I think it hit me so much because my little sister is not so little anymore. She is a woman and now there is a permanent record of her transition from girlhood to womanhood.
We didn’t go all out for this shoot. A friend did her hair and she wore her own clothes without picking anything from the studio wardrobe. But the power of this portrait is not in either of those things anyway. It’s in her eyes. Even they show that she is no longer a child. She has yet to experience the fullness of life, but she is hardly a stranger to neither it’s joys nor it’s disappointments. Life thus far has forged her into a beautiful soul melding her into a person that returns to this world with as much generosity that she has received from it.
It is my sincere hope to go on photographing her every year of her life as she grows into what she was always intended to be.