Kylie Wilwerth

My hope with this project was to be able to portray the life of my family, whether it be them as individual people, or how they interact together, and most importantly, what makes up “family”. I chose to photograph my family because they are the people who I care about the most, and the people who I chose to spend the most of my time with. I knew I wanted to do something involving portraits, because I love shooting portraits more than anything, and I thought it would be a really good experience to take the most candid photos of my family as possible so everybody else can see my family the way I do everyday.

My idea originally was centered around trying to just photograph my immediate family members, but as I began to shoot, I realized that more people in my life constitute “family” than I thought. Though this family project sort of became a family during quarantine project, before all the craziness happened, I was able to capture a few photos of some of the most important people not in my immediate family, my mimi and papa. They are a huge part of my family and my daily life, so I was elated that I was able to get those few pictures in and be able to feature them in my project. Then, I realized how much my boyfriend is a part of my family, as I began to shoot, I noticed he was in more photos than I thought and how much he is part of my family as well.

Something I noticed about my project was that it mainly took place in my kitchen. My family got our kitchen redone this past summer, and before that, there were only two seats in the kitchen so we couldn’t even all be in there at once. Since the day the kitchen was completed, we have spent almost every night hanging out in there, whether it be attempting to bake something, listening to music blasting on the tv, or playing card games and doing puzzles, as seen in some of my photos. It gave us a place, aside from a TV room where you often focus on television, to sit and talk and actually focus on enjoying time with each other.

As I looked through all of my photos once I uploaded them, I was super happy with the amount of individual people I was able to shoot, as well as the shots of different family members interacting. I really liked that the majority of my photos were candid, which is what my goal was with this project. I chose each photo for a specific reason; for example, the one of my sister, Ava, taking chicken nuggets out of the toaster oven was chosen to show, what I like to call, her “chicken nugget quirk”, because that is the only thing she will eat for dinner at the age of 13 years old. Another photo with a specific meaning behind it is the one of my dog, Buddy, at my dad's feet, because when we first got Buddy, it took all the convincing in the world, because my dad had never had a pet and wanted no part of having one, and now Buddy is his BFF.

I think collectively, these photos all came together really well as a whole, and I hope I was able to portray what I think of as “my family” through my eyes for everybody else to see.