A Family Portrait with Anna Lengstrand in Pemberton, BC
Passing back through Pemberton, British Columbia, I had the joy of making a family portrait with Anna Lengstrand and her baby daughter. Over the years and a handful of visits to this corner of the Coast Mountains, Anna and I have made tintypes together more than once, and there's a trust that builds in front of a 19th-century camera. With Anna Lengstrand it has only deepened with time. This visit we set the wet plate aside and shot digital, but that same ease carried right through.
This session felt like a continuation of that ongoing story: mother and daughter, quiet and unhurried, captured the way the moment actually felt rather than the way a portrait is "supposed" to look. That instinct toward honesty isn't surprising. Anna Lengstrand is herself a photographer, model, and jewelry maker, and her own work lives in exactly that space, with women, motherhood, and moments of quiet connection. As she puts it, she photographs people "not as they should look, but as they feel."
You can sense the same values in everything she touches. Her modeling is about presence and authenticity rather than perfection or trends, and her handcrafted jewelry carries, in her words, "whispers of ancestral wisdom, the rhythm of reindeer herds, and the quiet power of nature." Photographing someone who sees the world this clearly is a gift, and she meets the lens with a calm that suits both wet plate and digital alike.
If you'd like to see more of Anna's own beautiful work, you can find her at . My deepest thanks to Anna Lengstrand and her family for once again sharing their time, their home of Pemberton, and now this new chapter with her daughter in front of my camera.
