Capturing Beauty in Your Family Portraits

Photography by Lisa Galvin

Focusing on the Good

What do I like about being a professional photographer? Capturing beauty. That’s it. And the beauty I feel compelled to capture is inside all of us. Put there by God, who created us in His image. Yes, we have ugliness too. But I’ll let the edgy photographers capture that. 

There’s this attitude in parts of the photography world, which says that the style of portrait photography I do is not authentic or valuable.  This has plagued me in the back of my mind since my days at journalism school at the University of Kansas. It was a topic in the art photography classes I took also. Many photographers think we should use photography to make statements about the world, enact social change, expose the scary things of the world. Many photographers might say that my portraits are a farce, because people really aren’t as happy and “perfect” as the images make them out to be. I disagree. 

“When I look at the images, I think they perfectly capture our imperfect family.”

— Diane Dultmeier

Can we be faking it in a photograph? Most certainly. I know there was some faking in our recent family portraits with our two teen boys. They didn’t particularly want to be there. There was bickering in the car on the way to the location. But they pulled it together long enough for us to capture some nice images. (Lisa Galvin, the photographer, did a great job working with us!) And when I look at the images, I think they perfectly capture our imperfect family. And of course I spent a lot of time finding the shirts we wore, lamenting over the right combination. And I lamented over my hair and my face (which I am stuck with).

Do I think the images are a fake reality? No. I think they capture us in the way we want to see our family--together, cohesive, smiling, touching. With teen boys would this moment happen organically? Not likely. Not likely at all. But do we feel it on the inside? Yes, we feel connected, our hearts touch each other, we smile, we joke, we laugh, we enjoy each other. (Definitely not all the time, though.) I keep a journal and I note the struggles we are going through, the conflicts, the fears. Those will be memorialized in another way.

But when I look back, I want to see these images of our best moments. Having us all in one place together looking pretty good is a rare thing. We are real people with real lives, schedules, messes, and struggles. But for a moment in time, we put that all aside to lock in a memory of our family during this time of life. These images will increase in value as the years go on. I know that already because of past images of our family. I remember how, at the time, looking at them was like looking in a mirror--we still looked like that (if you added in the chaos of daily family life). But now when I look at our older portraits, it is looking at our family history. Those times are gone. And in my heart and mind, I remember what else was going on in our family at the time. The images bring me back and I like it.

I want to be brought back to THIS time someday. And I want to bring my whole family with me, able to look at the images and say, “Remember that? Wow, we have changed a lot since then! Look at his haircut. Remember how annoyed you were on the way there?” And in my heart I will cherish who we were then and who we have become as a family and as individuals, feeling a combination of sadness and joy that we are in this together. 

A family portrait brings your family together and memorializes you as a group of connected people. Hanging the portrait on your wall tells you and the world how important this group of people is. And if we look around the world, there are enough things trying to tear families apart. Let’s focus on the things that bring us together. Let’s focus on the good moments.  Let’s focus on the beauty of this world. We need the beautiful things right in front of us, reminding us and helping us through the struggles we are sure to encounter.