AND THEN SHE SPRANG

In and then she sprang, I took on documenting the life of my daughter, one day at a time, for the entirety of a year from her ninth birthday to her tenth. Quickly I realized that in the same way as the process of observation required much careful attention, the constraint of the daily picture format made its execution turbulent and challenging. Life was made up of situations, and I was going to have to let go and be flexible with my exigence as a photographer if I was to depict a truthful picture of Luigia. So I learned to sit back and observe. I learned to work in low light situations, I brushed up on artificial lighting, I trained myself to have my camera at the ready, always. But most importantly, I tried to efface myself and let my daughter grow as a multi-facetted subject, I aimed at taking a step back and at letting her candor come out. The images in and then she sprang developed into a mosaic of moments with my daughter as the glue. In the end it was merely while editing the series, some years after it was shot, that I realized that and then she sprang is an enduring, life-affirming meditation on the mundane humanity of Luigia, a young girl living with Down Syndrome whose journey is more commonplace than not, and whose intrinsic, un-communicated profundity is a broader one than one might perceive.