Gregory Halpern USA. Rochester, New York. March 18, 2020. I've never made or shared many pictures of my family. For the past week (and for the first time) I started photographing my kids, Ava and Iris, somewhat ob
(...) sessively. I don't know yet if the pictures deserve much of an audience beyond my immediate family. But it’s been good to have something so joyful to put my time into. I can get severe cabin fever, and I can get depressed when I'm not busy, so I'm up against that. The funny thing is that a few months ago, my schedule was so crazy busy, and I was complaining nonstop that I needed to slow down but didn't know how. I missed reading, watching movies, being present with my kids. I even traded in my iPhone for a flip phone in an attempt to slow down! Hilarious, isn't it? The girls seem to be enjoying the slowness, but like me, they are also butting up against its limits. They play with each other all day long, generally quite well, but they are starting to fight more, as they are each other’s only company. This morning I sat in bed with a cup of coffee next to my older daughter Ava as she woke up. It was the kind of thing I would normally never do on a typical morning when we're all racing out the door. When she woke up she told me she had two dreams last night—in the first one, she could fly, in the second one, her friends showed up at our house. © Gregory Halpern | Magnum Photos