Blaire Hawes (b. 1980) is a self taught photographer. Thanks to her self confessed hyper-fixation on the works of Hans Holbein and the Tudor period, her images have a unique command of natural light, tight spaces, minute detail and close crops. Hawes turned to a camera while on enforced bedrest with her second child. With a simple, point and shoot camera she was forced to work slowly from her bed, learning the edges of her compositions. These edges came to define her work. Her photographs capture the fleeting things memory forgets but that the eye once read; the spaces of a childhood, the edges of beauty, the weight of a heavy sigh, the breeze on a cheek.

Hawes’ camera afforded her a way to study without judgment while almost forensically picking out the detail that makes the moment and the person unique. As years progressed, she honed her skill, capturing people as they are and where they are. Never asking them to pose, or manufacturing the composition, led Hawes to local nonprofits who needed imagery for their programs for neurodiverse and physically diverse people. This still is a large part of her practice.

Like Sally Mann before her, photographing her own children became a part of Hawes’ active parenting. As her second child grew, Hawes noticed many of the same neurodiverse traits that she saw in the kids she was photographing. This led to an autism diagnosis. After a number of long, challenging years, Hawes realized that when her child was having a meltdown, she would focus on Hawes’ camera shutter and calm down. So, from the age of 3, they have created a series called “SIX CLICKS.” Adhering to strict parameters, Hawes takes 6 frames. No more, no less. In Hawes’ words, “we make art together out of struggle. Art saved us. Art saved me.” From the beginning, the works have combined factual observation and contrived fiction, putting her distinctly in the camp of postmodernist photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Mann who record their lives with embellishment and embroidery just as Hawes does. In some images, swim goggles are filled impossibly with erasers. In others, the child hides naturally behind film. Seen together these portraits become a story of motherly love, and the sweet struggle of parenthood against the innocence of youth frame after frame, crop by crop, click by click.

But it is not just the portraits of her own family that are singular. Hawes’ lens turns to subjects as diverse as dancers, mothers, models, all capturing them with the pinsharp precision of her close crop, shooting them as they are. No makeup. No touch ups. With skin, wrinkles and blemishes in tact. For Hawes, photos make people immortal, captured forever as she saw them. They also leave something of Hawes herself behind. In each image a palpable love of people lingers, a celebration of difference, and search for what is good and beautiful in us all.