Most of what I shoot is families, women and brands. Real people who came in nervous and left standing differently. I love that work and I would not trade it.

But every so often I need to make something that exists for no reason other than that the idea would not leave me alone.

This one started with a picture in my head. Cream tulle, a magnolia in one hand, a skull in the other, against a green somewhere between seafoam and storm cloud. No client, no occasion. Painters have been putting flowers and skulls in the same frame for four hundred years, because side by side the two of them say something neither says alone. Everything blooming is already on its way somewhere else.

We shot it. It came out exactly as I had pictured it, which does not always happen.

And then we kept going, and the frames I keep coming back to are not that one.

She rolled her eyes. She scrunched her whole face up. She grabbed her cheeks and bared her teeth. She gave me a look over one shoulder that I would not want aimed at me. Nine expressions, none of them planned, every one of them better than the pose I had spent two weeks imagining.

If your gallery does not include at least one face your mother told you not to make, did you even have fun?

I say that as a joke, but I mean it as a working principle. A concept is scaffolding. It gives everyone something to hold onto for the first twenty minutes, and it earns you the trust to keep shooting after the plan is finished. What actually ends up on the wall is almost always the moment somebody forgot to be careful.

This is the part that matters if you have been thinking about a session and putting it off. You do not have to be poised. You do not have to know how to stand or what to do with your face. Most people who come here have never been photographed properly and are quietly certain they will be bad at it, and every single one of them makes at least one frame like these without meaning to.

Emilia took every idea I threw at her and handed it back better, and her mother saw the makeup vision before I finished describing it. A concept is only ever half yours. The other half walks in with the person standing in front of the camera.

If you have been saving pictures on Pinterest, or you have an idea sketched on the back of something, bring it. A little editorial. A little cinematic. A little rebellious. And then let it fall apart in the best way.