Beyond the Princess Dress
My daughter turned seventeen this year.
It is a moment. A turning point. A tide quietly reversing that I cannot stop. Every year she moves a little farther toward her own life, and every year I find myself wanting to slow time just long enough to preserve who she is in that season. Photography has become the way I do that - for her, and perhaps even more for myself.
Most years we lean toward sweeping landscapes, flowers, and beautiful gowns. We chase mountain vistas, quiet lakes, and the kind of places that feel almost enchanted.
This year was different.
Seventeen brought a driver's license, college visits beginning to appear on the horizon, and the unmistakable feeling that childhood is giving way to something new. We wanted the photographs to reflect that. The gown was still there, but this time it wasn't soft florals and fairy tales. We imagined weathered places, rusting machinery, old motorcycles, forgotten trucks, and beauty that had been shaped by time rather than polished to perfection.
Jerome gave us exactly that.
We wandered through the old mining town, following whatever caught our attention. Rusted gears. Broken staircases. Faded paint. Shattered windows. Machines that had done their work decades ago and now sat quietly, slowly returning to the earth.
And then there was my daughter.
Standing in the middle of all that history, she wasn't fading into time. She was just beginning.
As we explored, I found myself thinking about beauty.
We spend so much of our lives chasing what is new. The newest car. The newest fashion. The newest chapter. Yet I've never believed beauty lives only there. I've found it in mountain sunsets and desert dust. In children and grandparents. In elegant architecture and abandoned buildings. In wildflowers growing through cracked concrete and rusted machinery that has long since finished its work.
Beauty doesn't belong to perfection.
It belongs to anything that invites us to stop, to wonder, and to look a little closer.
I hope my daughter carries that with her long after she forgets the details of this afternoon. I hope she remembers that her worth won't be measured by how new, successful, polished, or perfect she appears. I hope she continues to find beauty in unexpected places, and to understand that life is richer when we slow down long enough to really see it.
When I look back at these photographs years from now, I'll remember the old trucks and motorcycles, the music drifting through Jerome, and my daughter standing on the edge of adulthood.
I thought I was preserving seventeen.
Instead, I think seventeen quietly changed the way I saw her.
