Anna’s Session, New York, May 11
To be on someone’s wishlist. To walk slowly through golden light. This is what a photo session can be.
On Mother’s Day, May 11, I took the 1 train uptown—a red thread winding through Manhattan, pulling me toward something quiet and golden. It was late afternoon, the kind of light that slips softly between buildings and touches the day with a last, painterly warmth.
Across from me sat three women: a little girl, her mother, and a grandmother. They looked dressed for something meaningful. The mother held a violin case and a single red rose. The grandmother, a white one. Their silence wasn’t empty—it was full, like a page already written.
As I stood to leave the train, the little girl looked up and offered me the white rose.
I nearly took it. But I told her gently that I’d be working for the next few hours and the rose might not make it. “Keep it with your grandma,” I said. “I’ll remember it.”
And I do. I remember their faces, never photographed but engraved in the soft film of memory. Three generations. Two roses. One violin. A portrait that lives nowhere but here, in this moment, retold.
Above ground, the light had turned honeyed.
That’s where I met Anna.
We wandered through the quiet streets near Columbia University, where the light filtered like music through leaves. The shoot was her birthday gift—from her partner. But not just a gift. She’d written my name down, she said, on her birthday wishlist.
To be named in someone’s list of wishes—what could be more humbling?
Anna gave me full creative freedom. “Do as you see,” she said. And we did. We took our time. Changed outfits. Walked without hurry. The golden hour kept stretching itself, as if for us alone.
Her birthday gift became something more—a document of presence, of trust, of beauty unposed. And for me, it became the best Mother’s Day gift I didn’t expect.
Some portraits are never taken, but they stay. Others are shaped in late light, gently composed, and they endure—not because of what we see, but because of how we remember.
I carry both.
