This picture took a fraction of a second to be captured. A shutter of time with my family on a snowy morning with Annie who visited us at our home in Weston, Connecticut with her small team. She was very generous, kind and thoughtful not to take too much space with her presence. It took her 1.5 hours to drive out to us from the city and 40 mins from hello to thank you to goodbye. We were having fun with the kids here making breakfast in our kitchen - afterwards my wife, Katrin and I chuckled at how we could have let Annie talk us into wearing our pajamas for a Vogue shoot. Our playful sons, who I delivered a minute apart, are 5 here, and our radiant daughter is 1 - who my beautiful wife and soulmate inspiringly gave birth to naturally at home during the pandemic. I was also weary and grieving here. Grieving for an old life I had recently left behind, with old relationships, and old belief systems - I was shedding my skin in this photograph. Still grieving for my mother who I lost to Covid 1 month after my daughter was born. I was suspended in air upside down - it took 24 hrs of labor for my daughter to be born and 18 days for my mother’s organs to succumb. We were 2000 miles apart with only an iPad and an iPhone to connect us, until one day she pushed my call away because fighting for oxygen became more important than speaking to her daughter - when the days turned into lifetimes, and faded away with her essence - back when Southern California was “Ground 0”. On the morning of the shoot, I hung a picture of her on our refrigerator, hoping she’d make it in the shot with us - being in Vogue would’ve been a major highlight for her with her friends out west. She did. I will always cherish this photograph not only for the family memory of making it with Vogue and Annie, but for the realization gifted to me at the time it was taken: that the capacity of the human spirit is far greater than anything I could have ever imagined, and at its core, is the regenerative love of family. [continued in comments]