Artist Statement – Through Their Eyes: My Sons, Growing Up in 2025
This series began not just with a question, but with a quiet need to understand my own children more deeply. As a father and a photographer, I found myself watching my two sons move through the world with a kind of quiet intensity. I wondered: What does the world feel like for them right now - in all its noise, uncertainty, and complexity?
Through Their Eyes is a visual diary, a study of childhood in 2025; but more than that, it’s a deeply personal look at my sons as they begin to form their own sense of self and place. These aren’t just portraits. They’re moments of observation, reflection, and connection. I wasn’t trying to pose them or extract emotion. I was trying to see them; as they are, not as I imagine them to be.
In photographing them, I noticed something unexpected: how often seriousness crept into their expressions. Thoughtfulness. Stillness. That same gaze I see when they’re quietly absorbing the world, trying to make sense of it in their own way. It reminded me that childhood isn’t always light; it's also layered, watchful, and often full of unspoken questions.
I chose to shoot the series in black and white to pare everything down to its emotional core. Colour can distract. Stripped of it, we’re left with the essential: the softness of their faces, the texture of their clothing, the weight in their eyes. The goal wasn’t to romanticize them, or childhood - but to honour it. To witness them in real, vulnerable, unscripted moments.
This project is for them, and about them. But I hope, in seeing these photographs, others might also recognize something universal in the quiet strength of children - how deeply they feel, how much they carry, and how closely they are already living in tomorrow’s world.