My Day in the Life sessions are an honour each and every time to photograph. For the most part, I am working with adoptive families on this session to produce a story of their first moments as a family, but working with the Grandbois family was an entirely different dynamic.
Kathryn and Matt were only in Seoul for a short time for a short work contract, and wanted a more documentary style of their lives while they were here. It would be an entirely different session for me, as I would be capturing an established family dynamic rather than the building of one.
I met up with Kathryn and the children one afternoon to discuss what their lives here had been like, and what a typical day looked like for them. We decided to start our session as the children were waking up, with the usual morning routine of making breakfast together, and then play the day by ear but try to include a historical site they hadn’t visited yet, the Children’s Grand Park, and Tomatillo, the tex-mex place by where they had been living.
Beginning our day at 7am, Alice got us going with an alphabet game with her dad. When Ray woke up, Alice and dad had all but got the morning’s pancakes ready. Alice chopped pancakes up and fed them to her little brother while mum and dad got a couple of minutes to eat their own breakfasts.
As someone who doesn’t have their own children, but certainly was a child some time ago and part of a family, it’s quite a treat to watch another family at work, and to try and capture that honestly. Over the course of the day, I captured almost 4,000 frames of everything I saw that felt important. During the edit, I got to relive the day, and really piece together the story that I had been a part of.
Below you will see a cross-section of that story as I felt it.
