We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kaleen Enke. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kaleen below.

Hi Kaleen, thanks for joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

When most people think about having family pictures taken, they think about portraits where everyone is grouped together and looking at the camera. Portraits are important parts of our family’s visual history, but I offer a different way for families to be photographed.

With my approach, there is no struggle to get everyone dressed in nice clothes, no rush to get to a location at a special time, no real preparation at all. I photograph families’ lives, the ordinary moments that make up our time together with the people who matter most. I come to the home and hang out with the family and do my best to see and capture who they are as a unit. I observe the caregiving moments, the mundane routines, and the random quirks that make every family unique, spending anywhere from an hour to a full day with families. The result is a collection of images that tell the story of how the family spends their days, a visual time capsule of a particular moment in their family history.

And I always offer to take a family portrait as well.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’m a photographer who primarily focuses on family life, relationships, the experience of motherhood, and childhood play. I have been obsessed with documenting my life with photographs since I got my first camera when I was seven. That pink 110 film camera stayed attached to my wrist. I photographed my life all the way through art school, and then again through my master’s in early childhood education when I decided to become a teacher. I photographed my students as I watched them play and make observations about the world around them. When I became a mom, my love for photography became more than just an obsession with creating a record of my life, it grew into an obsession with the craft itself. Every week I gave myself a different assignment for something to learn or work on as I photographed my children playing. I was so obsessed with photographing my own family, I started asking friends if I could photograph their families for fun. From there, it just made sense to go ahead and turn it into a business.

As a business, I offer a variety of family photo sessions ranging from one hour of documentation to a full record of a day in the life. I help families make albums or decide how to best display their photos after the session. There is usually one person in the family who normally takes the pictures, and I help them be able to get in the pictures. I also offer families the opportunity to be seen and accepted for who they are as a family, not for a highlight reel version of their best looks. They get to see how truly beautiful and good their real life is (even during really hard times like extended hospital stays or divorces).
When all the digital pictures of their family get lost in the cloud someday, they can relax knowing they have a tangible record of their family life that they can enjoy long after the memories have faded.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My friend is a photographer and came to visit our family when my daughter was 10 days old. Our house was in the middle of renovations, we had no finished nursery, and I was trying to figure out all the new things about having a baby. I did not feel like we were very photographable, but she took pictures throughout her stay. When she sent me those photos, I saw our family in a completely new way. Instead of an unfinished house and a postpartum body, I saw a space that we were creating and making our own, a baby who we adored, and all the ways we were changing to adapt to this new chapter of our family history. The love and acceptance and gratitude I felt for our family just as we were in that chaotic moment of time was surprising and fulfilling. It’s that feeling that I hope to recreate for the families I photograph, that feeling that our as-is version of who we are as a family is good.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a photographer is being able to nurture my curiosity and creativity as part of my job. I have made it a point to prioritize having time to learn and read and look at art. I enjoy working on personal projects that continue to push me to learn more about the craft and better understand my own vision. In the past, the creative aspects of my life were often the first things to drop when life got busy, but I now protect that time as I realize how important it is to the quality of my life and the quality of the work I am able to produce.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kaleenenke.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/kaleenenkephoto
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/kaleenenkephotography

Image Credits
Image of me by Stephanie Howard Photography