With my exhibition, my goal was to bring the viewer inside my family’s home and experience how we have lived the last year of our lives with a different closeness. I wanted to take the perspectives of my family members in our home’s kitchen, and allow them to dictate the pace for each separate photograph, capturing them candidly through photojournalism.

Through this body of work, I not only hoped to achieve that sense of closeness in my family, but wanted to show the importance of our kitchen in our home, and how it shapes our family’s interactions. I wanted to convey my personal recognition of familial connections, but also subtly show the toll that quarantine and isolation have had on all of us.

I chose to use photography because of its connection to reality, and how easily I can express different emotions through usage of photojournalism. I had more freedom and range through using this medium, too, because of how quickly I can capture different moments.

I chose the kitchen as the centerpiece of our house unintentionally. I first began with the familial concept of our home and shared spaces, and the kitchen followed, as I found myself taking most of my images from in there. It presented as a bit of a challenge to get off the ground, because of the excessive absence of light that it has. It was also difficult to make myself shoot a variety of subjects, and not to just fall back on whoever remained in the kitchen at the time. With the finished artworks for my exhibition, I wanted them to feel familiar and friendly, but also tell a full year’s story from my point of view. I took the essentially establishing image of the kitchen and made it a touch bigger than the rest of the photographs so it could once again become the centerpiece. Then I took the rest of the images and placed them neatly above or below the bigger image to once again enforce that feeling of coming together around a common setting. I wanted the kitchen’s importance to be obvious, but figuring out what the rest of it all means would be later to follow.

My initial inspiration came from Kirsten Lewis, a family photographer who uses her photojournalism skills to capture families candidly, and in the moment. I wanted to use her inspiration to my advantage by later making my photos black and white, because I wanted the people and setting in the pictures to be the only focal points. I’m happy with the result that followed with her inspiration, because it was one of the leading factors that pushed me to only focus on one location for the shoots.