Behind the Lens & Between the Feedings: Dispatch №9

On leaving New York and never really leaving New York

I didn't think I'd be writing this one.

When I started this series I was a pregnant New York City photographer figuring out how to slow down. I was writing about stroller pace on the Upper East Side and the 4pm light in Central Park and what it means to build a life and a business in this city. That was the story I thought I was telling.

And then, the way life does, it handed me a different chapter.

We're leaving New York City.

From NYC to Connecticut

It came down to three things: space, family, and childcare. Simple as that, and also not simple at all. We're not going far. Connecticut is just a Metro North ride away, close enough that my husband and I will commute into the city for work. When I think about it that way it's the easiest decision I've ever made. I want the world for her. This is step one.

What I'm grieving

I'm going to be honest though. This one stings.

There's a version of my life I had mapped out here. A New York City life, full and complicated and expensive and completely worth it. I wanted to raise my daughter in this city the way I built myself in it. In the middle of everything, surrounded by every kind of person, on the same grungy subway car as every walk of life. 

I didn't get to have that version. And I'd be lying if I said that didn't feel a little like failure even when I know, rationally, that it isn't. Cost is not a personal shortcoming. Choosing your child over a postcode is not a retreat. But the feeling shows up anyway and I think it deserves to be named.

I love this city. Its energy, its diversity, its relentlessness. It made me a photographer. It made me sharper and more observant and more alive to the world around me than I would have been anywhere else. New York doesn't leave you just because you leave it.

The Cockroach Club

Which brings me to something important.

I have decided to found a proverbial organization. It is called The Cockroach Club and it is for New Yorkers who have technically left the city but remain in a state of dignified, proud, slightly delusional denial about it. We are not gone. We are simply distributed. We commute in. We still have opinions about the best bodega coffee. We will never, ever fully let go.

Membership is open. I am the founding president. Maybe I will take my new needpoint hobby and make us some patches.

NYC & Connecticut photography

New York City will always be home base for my wedding and engagement work. That's not changing. If you're getting married in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Hamptons, or anywhere in between, I'm still your photographer and I'll be on that train before you've had your morning coffee.

But I'm genuinely excited about what Connecticut opens up. A different pace. Different light. The kind of unhurried family sessions and engagement shoots that feel more like a slow New England morning than a New York minute. There's something in that that connects back to where I came from. After everything this year has handed me, leaning into that feels exactly right.

More soon. From the other side of the bridge. 📸🤍