Most of our lives are not as dramatic as the lives in novels or movies. A few instances have that kind of excitement but most of our days are passed in everyday moments. I seek to elevate these to something grander, something that connects us to a greater sense of meaning in our lives.
The kids in this photo are three of my four children. It was taken in 2017 in the hall of our home in Merion Station, outside Philadelphia. I keep my camera and tripod under the couch in the living room so they’re always available. It was the day after Easter. The children had just come home from school and were reading in the hall. What I like is that these three individuals are occupied in their own worlds. As parents, when we’re photographing children, we have a tendency to get them to line up, have them look at the camera and smile. Here, it’s not about them being cute or part of a family, though. It’s about them in their own private spaces, their own minds.
The child who’s reading a book seems oblivious to me taking a picture. The one studying a map is very engaged in that. The way my daughter is cocking her head to the side and looking curiously – it’s almost like she’s studying the viewer, rather than the viewer studying her. There’s a sense of individuality that I find interesting.
I was drawn to the light. One of my early mentors was the US photographer Arnold Newman. When I look at this, I think of his words about using available light and the environment to show people’s lives. I also like the way the children are bracketed by their great-grandparents because family is the foundation on which we craft our identities. This is a domestic portrait: the portraits help underscore that theme.
I try to keep photographing my children to a minimum. If I took the camera out all the time, they’d get annoyed. These pictures aren’t meant to be photojournalistic: my kids know I’m there but I try to work quickly and specifically, so they don’t feel like they’re “on”.
I do advertising work sometimes and those scenes are perfectly arranged. This isn’t that. I like the masking tape you can see on the back of the eggs glued to the door’s window, the piece of streamer that’s hanging off the floral arrangement, how bright blue my son’s socks are. All those things are “wrong”, but preserve the veracity of the moment, making you feel this is a real domestic space.
I grew up looking at paintings. My mom loved taking my sister and me to galleries and museums. I’ve always been drawn to northern European artists: Van Eyck, Vermeer, Holbein. When I studied art history, I expected to look mostly at pictures like Michelangelo’s gorgeous Italian dramas. But when you look at northern European pictures, you realise everything’s happening beneath the surface of these quiet images, that the environment is important in describing the narrative. I wanted to be an artist. But they didn’t have room for me in the painting class at school so I got accidentally put into the photography class. I quickly fell in love with the medium.
I received a letter the other day from a woman who had spent time looking at my photographs. She said they made her cry and provided a sense of hope and beauty about our relationships with the people closest to us. Maybe there’s a sense of truth to my work that resonates with people. That’s what art does: it makes sense ofour lives. With my work, I hope to make sense of the quotidian, the parts of our lives we don’t necessarily pay attention to that are actually the parts that matter. At the end of our lives, they are what we will look back at.
• Here by Jessica Todd Harper is published by Damiani. Her work is also part of the Kinship exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery-Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, until January.
Jessica Todd Harper’s CV
Born: Albany, New York, 1975
Trained: Art history at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), New York.
Influences: Arnold Newman, Johannes Vermeer, Hans Holbein, Carl Larsson.
High point: “I recently had an exhibition at Le Centre Claude Cahun, Nantes, France. My sister and I took our daughters and my new baby to the openings. It was very special.”
Low point: “As a student at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, I fell down the stairs of the Métro, tore the ligaments in my ankle and had to do six weeks of bedrest in a studio apartment.”
Top tip: “Work with what you’re most curious about because that will translate to the viewer.”
