Nothing is forever. Photograph it anyway.

Isn't it funny how you never know when something is happening for the last time.

I've moved more times than I can count. Different cities, different countries, different continents. Sometimes planned, and other times not. For the past twenty years, home has never been a fixed thing for me. It's been something I build, find, and eventually learn to let go of. Over and over again.

I wish I had more photographs from those chapters. The particular light in a kitchen I loved. The view from a window in Vienna I'll never see again. The way our San Francisco apartment felt at sunset. Most of it lives only in memory now, and memory, as it turns out, is not as reliable as we'd like to believe.

A few weeks ago I photographed a family that stopped me in my tracks.

When they first reached out, they were unusually specific about what they wanted. Not just beautiful images. They wanted this: Their morning routine. The breakfast they make together. The corners of their home their kids have claimed as their own. The neighborhood they walk through without thinking about it yet.

"This is probably not our forever home," they told me. "This city, this neighborhood, maybe not even this country. We don't know how long we'll have this."

I had to sit with that for a moment. Because I know that feeling so precisely. The quiet awareness that the life you're living right now, the one that feels so ordinary, so unremarkable, is the one you'll ache for later.

So we started early. Before the day had a chance to perform.

I was there for the brushing of teeth and the making of coffee. I watched them negotiate breakfast and witnessed the small dramas that only families witness. I noticed which mug she always reaches for. The way the older one has already started asserting their independence, and the way the younger one watches them, quietly cataloguing everything. The looks the parents exchange over their children's heads. The ones that say: are you seeing this?

And the light. The early morning light that poured through their windows like it this was the only place it needed to be.

This is why I do what I do.

Not because I want to make beautiful photographs, though I hope they are. But because I understand, more personally than most, what it means to leave a home behind. What it costs to realize too late that you didn't look carefully enough while you were there.

Your home right now, the one that feels permanent or temporary, the one you're not sure about, the one you keep meaning to fix up before you photograph it, that home is worth documenting. Your routines are worth capturing. The way your family moves through a morning together is a story that will not repeat.

Nothing seems permanent. That's exactly why it matters.