I’m excited to introduce the first family in this series that features parents who are also of mixed race. Both Margaret and Loren are half-Asian/ half Caucasian and they live in Queens, NY.

I think there is a point in any ongoing project where you start losing focus and you start having doubts. I’m not sure if I’ve reached that point quite yet, but I have been feeling it to some degree. What is this for? Who am I doing this project for? When will I know when it’s “done”?
 
It’s taken a lot of time and coordination to schedule and get each story done. It’s always a bit intimidating to enter into a stranger’s home and photograph them at some of their intimate family moments. I mean, it’s strange. But by the time I leave the photoshoot, I feel like I know them a little.
 
So I don’t know where this is going, if anywhere at all. I know I have more to learn and that is motivation in itself. I guess I’ll keep on going…

It’s been awhile since I uploaded a new family on The Mixed Race Project, but I’m excited to share a new family with you today. Annie & Michael live right here in Brooklyn, New York and are raising a 7 year old girl and a 3 year old boy. Annie is from Colombia and Michael is a born and bred New Yorker. Annie is a Pastry Chef who runs her own business called PicklePetunia Made and she’s been super nice enough to help out a few times in the kitchen when Mark has been slammed during the holidays.

The Mixed Race Project has been hard for me to keep up because scheduling shoots, interviewing the families and editing the photos have been a time management challenge, but I don’t want the project to slide. I’m looking for a few families to shoot when we’re out on the West Coast this year: LA, Portland and Seattle. If you would like to participate and we can coordinate timing, send me an email at info@themixedrace-project.com

A new family is up on the The Mixed Race Project.

I want to tell you about another reason why I was interested in doing this project – I wanted to document and photograph moms, families, dads and their homes just as they are. You know, “normal people”, not styled or staged in a way that make them appear unlike how they are in everyday life. In all of the photoshoots, I really did just drop in on these homes and start taking pictures. I gave loose instructions not to bother cleaning the house especially for the shoot or get dressed up in clothes that they wouldn’t normally wear on a weekend.

I know that at times we crave escapism and sometimes that manifests into leafing through highly stylized spreads of these beautifully designed homes that are inhabited by successful, stylish women and their equally stylish kids, however, to me that isn’t real. In reality, it’s a fantasy that many of us can’t attain or relate to. A cluttered kitchen with stuff on the counters are real. An unorganized pile of shoes. Moms in clothes that are believable on a Sunday morning, not in cocktail dresses or heels. Why do we not see more of these kinds of images? Why can we not celebrate the beauty in all families and homes? I hope that you too, can see the beauty in these families’ lives, as I discovered while photographing them.

A new family to share on The Mixed Race Project: Christine & Matt. They live in San Francisco and have a 2 year old daughter, Maile.

Thanks for your continued support and suggestions for the project. I’m working on trying to get more diverse families in the future, particularly with older kids as well as families with adopted children. As with anything, it’s a matter of logistics, time, and the challenge of scheduling!

I have a new project to share with you today, something that I’ve been working on for a few months that finally launched on Friday. I got the idea for The Mixed Race Project earlier this year and I swear, sometimes I’m surprised that I managed to put it out there at all. Have you ever worked on a project where you over think the concept and idea to the point that you start doubting yourself? There have been so many doubts and reservations with this project from the start. I wasn’t confident in my photography skills and was afraid I wouldn’t do these families justice. I didn’t necessarily want to focus on the politics of race because it’s such a sensitive topic, however I didn’t want to completely ignore it either. I didn’t know where the balance should lie. I was concerned, because of the logistics of travel, that the families I would be photographing would only be representing a small segment of the multiracial experience, that the project would risk not telling the stories of those who have had a hard time being accepted by their communities. I knew that the project would be richer if it were more geographically diverse and I worried about the criticism of that.

But sometimes you just have to hold your breath and push through. I knew I believed in this project, partly because of the many positive comments and emails from you, dear readers, whenever I shared photographs or wrote about the girls in the context of their mixed race background. I also realized that in my research, I wasn’t finding images of multiracial families that I was curious to see. In many cases, photos of mixed race people always seemed to focus on the face. I was more interested in seeing the family in the context of their homes. I thought it was more revealing of how we lived as multiracial households to see glimpses into their everyday lives.

The online response to the project so far, has been overwhelming. It validated the idea despite all the reservations I had. I think I was too focused on whether the photos were good or worthy enough – this is a photo project after all, and one that I’m using to focus on improving my skills. This was certainly true when in San Francisco I panicked because I didn’t anticipate the foggy and cloudy lighting conditions, so I ran out and bought an expensive flash that saved the shoot, but that I still don’t really know how to use. I am learning all the time and with each shoot. It wasn’t until I received my first set of interview questions back from my gracious volunteer families that I realized none of that stuff mattered. I just needed to put it out there. The photos will improve with time, but I do hope the heart in this project shows through.