A few weeks ago I was thumbing through my socials when some amber-lit images stopped my scroll. The pictures were of a high school classmate–magic-hour shots in a mountainside field. Beneath them she had written: “I decided the end of my 30s warranted some ‘graduation’ photos.” What struck me most about the photos was not how beautiful my friend looked. It was that she was alone. No kids, no partner, no family. Just her.
In her post, my classmate–Jenn Wessels, a special education professional from San Diego, California—went on to explain that she wished she had more pictures of her own mom at her age. Her mother, who died at 53, appears in few photos Wessels has now—“unless she was in the background, hiding behind a kid.”
Wessels’s solo-photos post went instantly viral within her network—the likes and what a great ideas poured in. It does seem that way: an idea. Even as photo-capture technologies have evolved, the role of a mom in photos has remained pretty static. She’s taking the photo or missing from the photo or hovering at its edges. (This is at least an improvement over, say, the “hidden mothers” of early child portraiture, when photographers would drape a woman in dark brocade while she held her toddler still.)
Things aren’t much different when it comes to non-moms or other genders, though; it’s not all kids stealing the focus. In 2024, the number of professional, non-selfie photos we have of adults by themselves feels entirely out of proportion to how many pictures we’re taking. And the idea of arranging for your photo to be taken alone feels, in this day and age, feels…something. Intimidating? Indulgent? An insurmountable Everest climb of self-confidence?
Wessels hatched the idea for her session over the course of an evening. “I saw a friend post a picture of their kid graduating from high school–a fancy photo shoot–and I thought, ‘Why don’t we do this at other times in our lives?’” She had also been through several surgeries and prevention measures over the course of her 30s–Wessels and her sisters both inherited the BRCA2 gene. She had been through an actual chapter, and wanted to mark its close.
So she messaged Paloma Lisa, a California-based photographer who had shot Wessels’s wedding—“really fast,” she says, before she could overthink it. Lisa loved the idea, but Wessels found herself backtracking after the date was set. “It sounds weird to say now, but I felt like I was wasting money—like I should be spending it on my family.” She asked Lisa if she could switch to a family photo session, but Lisa pushed back. “My heart sank when I got Jenn’s message asking to switch to a family session,” the photographer says. “I empathized with her. I could sense the fear of focusing on herself. Our culture can put a lot of pressure on [women] to feel like we have to have some major life event, in order to be worthy of photography.”