Van Grouw Photography: Southern California Children's Photographer

Unless they were against the backdrop of an exotic landscape, children were once the last subject I fancied myself wanting to photograph.  In fact, I think that I have one photograph from college which features children...it was taken in the court yard of a forgotten church in Mexico,  off a dusty path made colorful, like a highway flanked by wildflowers, by the socks of Tarahumaran women selling crafts.  But I've noticed that being the mother of a child tends to change more than just the size of one's hips.   I LOVE taking photographs of children, babies, and newborns.  In the words of Socrates, "An honest man is always a child".  Photographs of children do not necessarily need fancy backdrops or scenic beauty to make them memorable, nor do they lie.  Photographs of children also have the ability to remind us of what we tend to miss, forget, or get too busy for in our everyday life: spontaneity.

When I was in college we were all on a journey to live life as if there was never a care or a worry, to seek the adventure around every corner and to worry about the consequences later, to "fly by the seat of our pants"so to speak.  While we were able to stumble upon some truly memorable moments, we were never truly satisfied and sometimes, it seems in retrospect, never truly happy.  In fact, I sometimes wonder if our lack of satisfaction and our lack of happiness wasn't intentional, a way of giving us something to write or sing or draw or talk about. A way to keep life "interesting". I have often attributed my lack of written creativity in recent years to the fact that I've been happy. No one wants to read about that, right?

Photographing children: chasing them around any given setting, laughing when they laugh, making silly faces when they don't, watching as they explore the world or create their own, focusing on the sparkle in their eyes or the honesty in their expressions, has given me the real opportunity to live spontaneously, if only for the few hours that I have them for a session.  Henry David Thoreau in his Walden wrote, "Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.".  The last few months I have had the honor of some very wise company... and here are some of my favorite moments from it.