My Flash and Blood is an ongoing photographic body of work in which I document the lives of my children, my own flesh and blood, using direct flash and analog point-and-shoot cameras. The project is a personal archive of childhood and motherhood, marked by intimacy, urgency, and the beautiful mess of everyday life.

As a female photographer and a mother, I approach this work from within the domestic space, capturing moments that are often overlooked: mundane, messy, tender, wild. I deliberately use simple analog cameras because they suit the fast pace of life with children. They allow me to respond instinctively, without interrupting the flow of what’s unfolding. Some of the photographs were even made with the same camera my mother used to document my own early childhood, creating a tangible link between her gaze and mine.

One of the earliest images in this body of work is a portrait of my daughter on her first day of school, taken just before she stepped inside the building. It was January, and it could not have been darker, both literally and emotionally. Her eyes mirrored exactly how I felt at that moment. The act of letting go reached a whole new level that day.

The blue-tinted photographs come from the last roll of film I shot with my mother’s thirty-year-old Minolta point-and-shoot. When the camera broke, I tried to fix it myself, but by doing so I ruined the film. The light leaks that seeped into the negatives shifted the colors, altering the images. For me, these photographs have become a metaphor for motherhood: the urge to solve everything in haste, to not ask for help, to accept that the outcome may be flawed but still deeply meaningful.

Some of the images in the work are doubled, created with a half-frame camera that stitched exposures together without my intention. I never plan these combinations, the camera does it for me. I embrace this surrender of control in my practice, because as mothers, do we ever truly have control? Just like motherhood itself, working with analog photography is a process of trying, failing, and starting over again. Yet I have learned that my strongest work emerges from intuition, from letting go of perfection and trusting the instinctive act of photographing.

The use of flash is both aesthetic and symbolic, it interrupts time, freezing a fleeting moment in sharp clarity. These images are not polished; they are immediate and honest. Over the years, as my children grow older, I hope they will continue to let me in with the camera, to trust me to capture their adolescence as truthfully as I have their early years. That evolving relationship is part of the work.

This project is also, in part, an act of reclamation. There are very few photographs of me as a teenager. My youth fell into the gap between analog family photography and the arrival of smartphones. My Flash and Blood is my way of filling that void, for myself and for my children, and for the archive of motherhood more broadly.

I will continue to develop this body of work, investing in its growth both conceptually and practically. My aim is to shape this intimate, long-term project into a narrative that speaks not only of my family, but of care, memory, and the motherly gaze in our collective world.