Do you have a photograph of yourself made before you knew who you’d become?

Not the polished headshot, not the portfolio piece you crafted with intention—but the tender one that arrived before you learned the vocabulary of the medium. Before shutter speeds and f-stops found their way into your muscle memory. Before you understood how deeply photography would embed itself into your life.

A picture made at that threshold—
when the craft was still new, 
and your future was still decades away.

Maybe it was created in the quiet of your bedroom, holding a camera for reasons you couldn’t yet articulate. Maybe it was made in a mirror, with no teacher but curiosity. Back then, you weren’t thinking about the “right” way to do anything. You were simply present—young, unfinished, luminous with possibility.

It is the portrait made a moment before you knew your own story.

Looking back now, such an image feels like a gift. Not because it is technically remarkable—most aren’t—but because it holds the unguarded beginning. The first spark. The moment before experience rewrote your vision and life taught you everything you didn’t yet know.

This is mine.

I always knew I would be an artist.

My father recognized it early, long before I understood what that meant. Once, he took me to meet a well-known artist in Topanga. The studio smelled of oil and turpentine, and light filtered through high windows. After watching me for only a moment, the artist told my father to bring me back when I was older; I was only seven then. I remember my father’s pride—his hand resting lightly on my shoulder, as though I truly belonged there.

It is one of the clearest memories I have of him.
Soon after, he was gone.

But the seeing remained.

Even as a child, I found myself drawn to ordinary things others overlooked—an afternoon sunbeam sliding across a wall, the soft glow of a teacup, the way color could speak without sound. I began drawing before kindergarten, trying to capture what stirred me, though I didn’t yet have the language to explain why.

I carried that ability to see into adulthood. I worked first as an advertising artist, then followed the quiet pull of photography. When I stepped behind a camera, I realized it wasn’t the act of rendering something perfectly that called to me—it was the conversation between light and subject, the way color shapes emotion.

Drawing eventually fell away, not because it lost value, but because I sensed my time was better spent differently. These days, I’d rather pick up a guitar than a pencil. Music, like photography, invites feeling rather than precision.

What has stayed constant is the way I notice light—how it reveals, softens, transforms. That part of me never left.

Decades have passed since that portrait was made in the mirror.
A career, a marriage, a family—
so many seasons have come and gone, each leaving its own mark.

I’ve photographed professionally, traveled, taught, learned, succeeded, failed, and begun again more than once. I became a mother and then a great aunt. I’ve lived long enough to understand how quickly time moves, and how precious the quiet in-between moments can be.

Yet when I look at the young woman in that early image, I recognize her immediately.

She didn’t know anything about technique or the discipline that would shape her future. She didn’t know how many times life would surprise her—sometimes gently, sometimes without mercy. She had no idea of the joy ahead, nor of the losses.

But she was already looking closely.
Already seeing.
Already following the light.

That is what remains.

The rest—careers, achievements, titles—those things shift and fade. But the core, the way I move through the world, has not changed. I am still drawn to what is quiet and unnoticed. I still chase the way morning light touches a wall. I still find beauty in small and ordinary places.

I think that is why this portrait feels so honest:
it shows the beginning, untouched by expectation.
A moment before I knew my own story.

What begins quietly often stays with us the longest.