With kids home from school and parents home from work, many local families are having to adjust to a new temporary-normal. In an effort to catalog this new way of life, community members in Geyserville and Healdsburg have begun taking “porch portraits” of families in front of their houses.
“All of my neighbors and my friends, all of their kids are home — you’d think it was the holidays. All their kids are home and that doesn’t happen too often,” said William Green, a Geyserville resident who started a “Geyserville Family Porch Portraits” Facebook page where he shares photos of his friends, neighbors and fellow community members.
“While everyone’s kids are home, why don’t we just document what’s going on?”
Green was inspired to start taking the portraits while thinking of things he could do with his family. It wasn’t until after he began taking them that someone told him about Healdsburg photographer Elena Halvorsen, who’s been taking porch portraits of families for the past week.
“I think it’s such a unique time,” Halvorsen said about using the photographs as a way to document the sudden change in everyone’s lives. “It’s definitely something that people generations from now are going to learn about, I would assume. I think that capturing what this shelter in place looks like for different families or people is an important way to show what it looked like. All families are doing that in different ways.”
When she goes to take portraits, some families choose to pose for the photo in funny ways that highlight everyone’s individual personalities, while others take the opportunity to dress up for a more traditional-style portrait.
Halvorsen estimates that since she began taking the photos, she’s photographed around 100 families or groups of people, and she has 30 more lined up to photograph this weekend.
Halvorsen’s approach differs from Green’s — while she takes her huge zoom lens around town for the portraits, Green’s photos are taken on an iPhone and the photo-taking is more of a family hobby.
“I like the idea, it’s cozy to the heart,” he said. “I’m not a photography guru by any stretch of the imagination.
“It’s given my family something to do,” he continued. “We’ve been going out to one family’s home at night, taking a picture and leaving. It’s given us something to do and an opportunity to say ‘hi’ to some of our neighbors.”
Once he takes a photo, Green posts it to the Geyserville Family Porch Portraits page with the family identified, but no additional comments.
“I like to keep it simple,” he said.
His goal is to take a portrait a day and see how long it can continue on for.
For Halvorsen, who works as a photographer specializing in portrait photography, taking photos from far away has been an adjustment.
“I’m still photographing families, but a lot of my job is connecting with the kids in the family so that they feel comfortable. That’s a lot trickier when I’m 25 feet away with this huge zoom lens,” she said. “I’m not able to really build that connection with the kids, but I have found that it really has been a bright spot for families when I come by. They seem genuinely happy to be outside on the front yard or porch or in front of their front door and taking a photo together.”
Halvorsen has her own family porch portrait, taken by her parents. She sanitized her camera and lens and asked them to come by and snap a photo.
“For me when I look at ours, you can really see everybody’s personality,” she said. “My youngest is in a butterfly costume and has her wings up and my oldest is kind of standing nicely and my son, who is our crazy one, is on the bannister of the porch. I think that when I look at my own, it’s like, ‘That just really does capture who we are right now and this experience of spending so much time together.’”
While Halvorsen is a photographer by trade, she said that she’s been offering the porch portraits on a sliding scale, because she doesn’t want people to feel like they can’t have a portrait done because they’re financially strapped.
Once she’s done taking porch portraits, she said that she plans to see if the Healdsburg Museum and Historical Society wants a collection of them as a way to partially catalog life during the pandemic. She’s also thought about sending the portraits to the Sonoma County Library, which is launching its own COVID-19 documenting project.
Green said that for him, one of the joys of walking around and taking the photos is getting to see his neighbors and the comfort of knowing that people are staying home.
“We’re supposed to be at home, so it’s not like we’re taking pictures of everybody else,” Green said. “It’s kind of comforting, knowing that the houses are filled up. It’s seldom that everybody’s home at the same time — kids going to school or kids who are away from home, it’s everything down to nobody’s going to work. It’s very sobering and comforting in its own way, because these houses aren’t always filled. Everybody’s movement has stopped, everybody’s cars are on the street — that usually doesn’t happen until nine at night.”
To see Halvorsen’s photography, visit.elenahalvorsenphotography.com/.
To look at the Geyserville porch portraits, visit https://www.facebook.com/Geyserville-Family-Porch-Portraits-102163508115435/.
