The Tan Residence
Three generations, one Saturday afternoon

The Story

The Tans live in a black-and-white colonial bungalow off Sixth Avenue. Three children, two parents, one grandmother. They had been planning to commission a family portrait every year since 2019, and every year something had got in the way — a baby, a school move, the pandemic, a house renovation. The 2024 session was finally the year they made it happen.

We were there for three hours on a Saturday afternoon, which happened to also be the grandmother's 87th birthday. She had asked for tea instead of dinner; she had asked, also, that no one announce her age. The children had decorated the dining table with paper chains. We arrived just as the kettle began to whistle.

"The photographs feel like a slow afternoon in our own house. That's the only thing we wanted."

We took our shoes off at the door, drank one cup of tea, then started photographing. The eldest daughter played the piano badly. The youngest read a book upside down. The grandmother held court at the kitchen table and refused to look at the camera, which is exactly how we like it. The middle son spent the whole afternoon trying to teach his cat to sit.

We took 612 frames in three hours. The final gallery has 74 of them. Our favourite is the one of the grandmother's hands — folded on the dining table, the candle still unlit, light coming sideways through the louvre window — that the family later printed three feet wide and hung in the hallway.