I have less than 10 photos from my childhood. Oddly enough, none of them are with my immediate family. We are slightly different from conventional families, for there haven’t been many days when all four of us have been under the same roof. I have, for lack of a better term, separate memories with them. At nights, I remember hugging my mother tight and falling asleep. I used to really like how she smelt. I remember getting badly thrashed by my father ‘cause I tried cutting my hair myself, while he explained to me how haircutting in an art and a barber, though unassuming, is an artist. I was forced to attend school with that haircut and to save face, I lied to my classmates that it’s a new hairstyle called ‘Unicut’:) And how can I forget my fairly athletic brother physically defending me when an older kid tried to bully and hit me? But then again, I have no photos of my childhood. And tomorrow, if I were to lose my memories, my childhood would literally cease to exist in any form.

When my daughter (Ruth) was born, I started taking photos of her. While she’s alone in some of those photos, many of them show her time with her mother (Rini). Decades later, Ruth will know how her mother used to be a young woman. She’ll know how clueless her parents were when she was growing up. We were literally winging it, while others were killing the parenting game. Let’s just say I am trying to create a backup of her memories, just in case she forgot her first years on this earth.

Somehow, by taking photographs of Ruth, I am trying to give her what I will never have - a retrievable childhood. And while I was doing this, I realised there might be so many Ruths out there. And I realised they too need some photographs in the future to trigger memories of a beautiful life before it got busy. Over the last three years, I have photographed several families as an extension of this personal project. My DITL Sessions (Day In The Life) with other families have been done in an attempt to supplement their memories - Just a visual pointer to an experience that is way deeper than what it looks in photos. As part of these sessions, I spend 6-8 hours photographing a newborn and his/her family, capturing their average day. No posing, no props, no cake smashes - just pure moments. Shooting in black and white using only natural light, I attempt to capture the physical interaction between parents and babies. And here are a few photos from such sessions :)