What You’ll Find in This Book

When you read through this book, you’ll find that it starts out a bit differently than how it continues and ends. The reason is that the first two chapters are more focused on family than photography. Specifically, the first chapter is centered on the history of what we consider family and the intriguing dynamics between family members—what family means to us and how it shapes who we become. The second chapter veers even further away from photography. It has to do with how family can be shaped, what it means to not have family, and how powerful photographs of family can be, especially after you’ve lost the people or the photographs.

This second chapter is the most personal section of a book I’ve ever written because much of it relates to how we built our family, which was in large part through adoption. Please don’t mistake this for a vanity chapter, because I found that the way I photographed families was greatly changed by the experiences of how we made up our family. I simply looked at the concept of family differently than I ever had before, and I knew better what to see when I was looking at families who had formed, no matter how they came to be who they were to each other today.