The Walls We Live With

Every once in a while, someone sends me a photograph of their house.

Not the kind you’d necessarily expect a photographer to get.

A hallway.
A staircase.
A bedroom.
A collection of frames over a console table.

And there, inside all of it, are photographs I made.

Sometimes they’re pictures I barely remember taking until I see them again. A toddler who is now a teenager. A family of three that became a family of five. A baby curled against someone’s chest who is now running around somewhere with a backpack and opinions.

I’ve been doing this long enough now that there are entire walls of people’s homes filled with April K photographs.

Which is a strange and wonderful thing to realize.

Because for so much of my career, I thought about the work in the immediate sense.

Did I get the shot?
Did everyone look good?
Was the light beautiful?
Would they love the gallery?

All very important questions, obviously. Especially the part where everyone looks good. We are not above vanity here.

But I think I understand the work differently now.

A photograph has one life when I make it.

And then it has another life entirely once it leaves me.

It gets framed.

It sits on a bedside table.

It becomes part of a staircase someone walks past every morning while carrying laundry.

It hangs in a hallway where nobody consciously looks at it anymore because it has simply become part of the house.

And somehow, I think that might be the highest compliment.

Not that someone stops in front of a photograph every day and thinks, what an incredible photograph.

But that it quietly becomes part of the architecture of their life.

There is something about that that moves me more now than it probably would have twenty years ago.

Maybe because I understand time differently.

When my own kids were little, I knew intellectually that it would all go quickly. Everyone tells you that. People practically chase you through Target yelling, “Enjoy every minute!”

Which, depending on the minute, can feel like a threat.

But knowing that something is temporary and actually understanding its temporariness are two different things.

You don’t really know what a five-year-old hand feels like in yours until you are holding a much bigger one.

You don’t know which ordinary things will become precious.

The bedroom.

The haircut.

The way they leaned into you.

The little gap in their teeth.

The family dog wandering into every photograph whether invited or not.

At the time, it is just life.

Later, it becomes evidence.

We were here.

This is what our house looked like.

This is how small you were.

This is how I held you.

This is who we were together.

And maybe that’s why I’m becoming less interested in photography as something that simply documents what people looked like.

I want it to hold something.

A season.

A feeling.

The atmosphere of a family.

And then I want it to go live somewhere.

Not disappear into a camera roll with 48,000 other pictures and three screenshots of a recipe you will never make.

I want it on the wall.

Because photographs change when you live with them.

They become less about photography and more about belonging.

I’ve seen homes where I photographed the newborn, and then the second baby, and then the whole family, and then suddenly there is an entire hallway telling the story.

Not perfectly.

Not chronologically.

Just layer after layer of a life being lived.

I don’t think I fully understood when I started this work that I would get to do that.

That I would leave little traces of my work inside other people’s homes.

That a photograph I took on an ordinary Tuesday might still be hanging there fifteen years later.

That children would grow up beneath images of themselves being held.

There are plenty of ways to measure a career.

Bookings. Revenue. Followers. Awards. Years in business.

And I care about some of those things. I’m human.

But lately, I keep thinking about the walls.

The staircases.

The frames.

The homes I’ll probably never walk into again.

And the photographs still living there.

Maybe that has been the work all along.

Not simply making beautiful pictures.

Making something people choose to keep close while their lives keep moving.

And I don’t know.

That feels pretty meaningful to me.