ABOUT APRIL
I’ve always been interested in what happens beyond the obvious.
I’m April — a photographer and artist based outside Boston, photographing people, connection, and the small details of a life that are so easy to miss.
I’ve been paying attention for a long time.
Before photography became my work, I studied broadcast journalism and fine art — two disciplines that taught me, in very different ways, how to look.
Journalism taught me to find the story. Fine art taught me to pay attention to composition, light, gesture, and what a single frame can communicate without saying anything at all.
I didn’t know it at the time, but somewhere between the two, I was learning how I would eventually photograph people.
I’m still looking for the same things now.
The hand resting on a baby’s back. The way your child leans into you without thinking. The expression that happens just after everyone stops looking at the camera. The wind, the light, the landscape, the tiny details that make a particular season of life yours.
The things we’re certain we’ll remember forever — and somehow don’t.
I’m not interested in manufacturing perfection.
Of course I’ll make the photograph where everyone is together and looking beautiful.
But those usually aren’t the only photographs I’m thinking about on the drive home.
I’m thinking about the ones in between.
The movement. The relationships. The ridiculous expression your child makes all the time right now. The way someone reaches for someone else without being asked.
My job is to make beautiful photographs, yes.
But more than that, my job is to notice.
To make photographs that don’t just show you what your life looked like, but bring you back to something about the way it felt.
The road here wasn’t exactly conventional.
April K began in 2011 after I photographed a wedding on a mountain — including part of it while making my way down on a snowboard.
I went on to photograph hundreds of weddings before my work naturally moved toward newborns, families, and the quieter stories happening closer to home.
For more than a decade, people have invited me into some of the most personal parts of their lives: wedding days, new babies sleeping on tired chests, children growing impossibly fast, families changing shape, people building businesses and becoming new versions of themselves.
The subjects have changed over the years.
What I’m looking for really hasn’t.
Sometimes there aren’t people in the frame at all.
My personal work is an extension of the same instinct.
I photograph the ocean, the coast, landscapes, and ordinary details simply because something about them made me stop and look.
Those photographs have increasingly become part of April K, too — available as fine-art prints and collected alongside my commissioned portrait work.
Because whether I’m photographing a newborn in her mother’s arms or the horizon disappearing into fog, the impulse is essentially the same:
Pay attention. This won’t look exactly like this again.
A little more about me.
I live in Westwood, Massachusetts, with my husband and our three kids.
When I’m not photographing, I’m usually reading something, snowboarding when New England decides to cooperate, working on something in our house, or thinking far too deeply about something that probably did not require quite that much analysis.
After all these years, I still love making photographs.
But I think what I love most is what photography asks us to do:
Stop long enough to really see what’s here.
Your life doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth photographing.
Portrait commissions are available throughout Boston and New England.