Natasha Kelly is a Melbourne-based photographer who catches moments like a true mother. Her photos are smart; like she preemptively knows what a child is going to do before they do it. I absolutely love the whimsical feel to her photographs, that she somehow maintains though only photographing real life. Thank you Natasha, for sharing your heart with us about why this work is important to you!
I am a documentary family photographer because I have a fascination with people & the inner-workings of families & how they interact with each other & with the world around them. I want to be able to see what people are like behind closed doors, without the outside pressure of “keeping up appearances.”
That’s the somewhat simple answer. But, it’s more than that. It’s not that I just want to see the stories of strangers, but that I also want to show my clients their story.
In a world full of pressures to be a certain way, look a certain way & feel a certain way, people seem to feel like they’re not enough; that they won’t be enough until they have the right house, or look, or until their kids are considered by others as well-behaved.
There seems to be so much focus on living big & that in order for something to be worthy of remembering, it must be big & shiny & fit into someone else’s definition of what perfect is. I want families to see that their story, as it is now, at this very moment of their lives, is worth telling.
Documentary family photography, to me, shows us that it’s all of those ordinary, every day things—the mess, the chaos, the mundane, the grit & the ugly—that define us. It’s the unnoticed, not just the beautiful bright moments, that make up our lives & that they are so worth remembering.
I got into documentary photography purely because I wanted to remember what my days with my family were like. I wanted to be able to have something to show my kids about what their childhood was like. Even growing up, I was the self-appointed “memory-keeper,” filling journals with stories about what was going on & taking photos alongside them. I didn’t know that documentary family photography existed, I just knew that these were the type of photos that I wanted to take.
I want to remember all of those little tiny things that make up LIFE. I want to pass those memories on to my children, to create their own history book, in real time. Not to have them have to dig around & try to unearth things years & years down the track. I want us all to be able to clearly see who we really were when we look back. And I think that every family deserves to have this too.
Natasha Kelly is a natural light, documentary photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in newborns, families & children & is a member of the AIPP(Australian Institute of Professional Photographers).
A natural story-teller, Natasha’s photos are raw & honest. Her love of photography & capturing those special little moments began as a child & she has not put her camera down since.