4 Generations of Women at Lovt Studio
We had this post sitting in our drafts for so long, I felt like it needed to say the ‘right’ or perfect thing to accompany this piece…
But to be honest I’m not sure we’ll ever find the right or perfect thing to say (and in part that’s because we’re not great at writing haha, we’re visual ppl!) Anyways we’re not going to adjust our original draft too much but we just wanted to apologize in advance for the jumble of words but we hope you’ll follow along with us:
We have always felt passionate about including diverse families and couples in our portfolio (online here and on our social media channels). What you shoot is what you attract so for a while we felt like we had too many… let’s say pale faces in our books. It’s incredibly important for couples and families to be able to see themselves in the work that we present, and we felt like we were lacking Black & Indigenous couples and families, so we reached out to one of our favourite organizations in the city for a helping hand— the Native Women’s Resource Centre of Toronto. Ethan and I (Stef) have been photographing with the NWRCT for a handful of years now and we can’t even begin to tell you how amazing they are, and even more so how thoughtful, sensitive, strong, and fearless, of a leader their executive director is. We’ve always wondered how we can provide more support to them so this past winter (PRE-COVID) we took some of our quiet down time as an opportunity to book a studio for a day and photograph a bunch of families and couples… specifically Black, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+ families and couples, and the NWRCT connected us with a few people open to the opportunity!
We had a few slots booked up and then last minute things came up for others but this wonderful family (who don’t mind their photos being shared, but rather remain nameless) stuck around. We had one of our good friends come by so we could photograph some of her products (scrunchies anyone?!), we took our new team photos, and then we focused our attention on these ladies! We listened to their playful banter that reminded us very much of our own families, we watched them hype each other up, we listened to their stories about how grandma just celebrated her birthday and they had a huge party with everyone and even brought in a live band! (We were jealous about that, wish we could have been there haha). And then we photographed them, we got them close, we photographed different groupings, one mother daughter and then another mother daughter.
After we were done and they left we wondered why we don’t see this more; more Black stories, Black love, Indigenous pride, Indigenous families, same sex couples who are POC. Just more. We told ourselves that we’d do this again, we’ll intentionally make time to share these loves stories and we’ll share them with the purposes of having them be more visible in the world, to normalize Black, Indigenous, trans, same-sex, 2 Spirit, etc. love.
But then the pandemic happened. Then George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, among so many others happened. Again. Suddenly it didn’t feel right to want to share something so joyous when something so terrible was happening (again), or even worse it’d feel like we were trying to capitalize off of it all! So this has been sitting in our drafts for a while but I think we all agree that it’s time to share it, especially since life seems to be getting into a groove of this new normal. It’s an important reminder that Black lives still matter, Indigenous lives matter, Black women especially need support and protection. And truly if we could be even a little bit as resilient, beautiful, kind, and as fun as these women (4 generations of women!!) are, then we truly believe the world would be a better place.
If you can, we encourage you to: Sign the ‘Justice for Breonna Taylor’ petition, donate to BLM Canada, support local Indigenous shelters like the Native Men’s Residence, and the Native Women’s Resource Centre of Toronto.
