2025 

In the summer of 2023, dear family friends were preparing to part with a historic lake house where generations of family members had spent summers, and where their own young children were still building formative memories of swimming, fishing, boating, and gathering. They invited me to walk through one day and photograph the house as I found it.

I was moved by the invitation, and by a desire to convey something of my own experience of the house during a handful of visits there over the years: an enveloping sense of layered time, with all the small details of present lives lived a few weeks at a time in a home that was otherwise little changed in a century. In that quiet hour moving alone through the house, I felt simultaneously like an outside observer documenting what I found, and at the same time like a trusted friend trying to hold with care the experience of a family I love in a place that loomed much larger in their lives than a mere vacation home—a place that figured deeply in the memories and identities of three generations I count as friends and several more before them.

I made these images for them, but they are not portraits, or even a documentary narrative about their relationship to this place. Rather, they seek to convey the warmth of my own experience as a visitor, observer, and friend.