With this piece I was looking at how we innocently once interacted with the camera in everyday family life, particularly in the context of home videos. These recordings were rarely eventful—just family members saying hello, playing their familial roles, and unknowingly documenting the ordinary moments that passed between them. They were personal and often unremarkable to anyone outside that family, but they caught something so pure and unassuming that is often missed with today’s technology. Something that has changed quite considerably in recent times is the duration of the moments captured and its with this shortened lens that we now miss these cropped out moments of intimacy.

There’s a profound banality to the home videos of years gone by, just family members capturing other members not doing much. I think back to the countless hours of my own family’s videos of me and my sister as children just counting coins or playing in the bath, and it’s with these seemingly mundane videos that we find the things we often miss most about the people we love. Because beneath their ordinariness lie moments so fleeting and delicate that they would simply slip through the cracks of memory if not captured. It’s these glimpses into our everyday lives, however unremarkable, that in turn become treasured archives of our loved ones’ idiosyncrasies.

I knew when creating this piece that the Honess family would be the most wholesomely perfect family to capture. Like the home videos of the past, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary happening here—just a family being themselves. But having been welcomed into their family for the last 9 years I have got to love and admire how well their different personalities blend together. This film is not just a window into the lives of an everyday family, but an ode to the beauty in our small, fleeting moments. It is a reminder that even in the most uneventful of times, we are capturing something so precious; the people who mean the most to us.