A New Chapter for Marmalade Photography – Chicagoland Family Photographer Since 2005

Some things are worth holding on to. Family being one of them. Photography of your family is another.

More than twenty years ago I picked up a camera as a professional Chicagoland family photographer for the first time. From moment one I started with a couple of simple and profound convictions:

• Photography should be filled with life, moments of contemplation, of movement, of joy, of pouting and of every moment in between…

• Photographs of families and children are not merely home decor. No. Photographs are meant to be documents. Evidence of existence, evidence of togetherness, evidence of love and evidence of belonging to something larger than ourselves.

In the years leading up to June 2005, when Marmalade Photography was birthed, I felt a quiet sort of anxiety fueled by the idea that family photography should not just be a “have-to-do” experience, one that felt like a chore at certain points in my children’s childhood. Oh it was fun in a way and not really a “chore” as I described it but it wasn’t full of life and movement. It was about corralling the girls, dressing them up, styling them – with no guidance, taking them to the local mall studio (Picture People or JCPenney!) and having them pose while all they wanted to do was run, play, explore…well frankly it wasn’t a representation of who they were at that time.

I found myself frequently taking my point and shoot camera out and capturing moments of life. My brother, Matt, was the inspiration for my capturing life in this way. Over the years with his then young family, I admired his many albums of his family in various moments. From the beautiful moments of his capture of his wife Ewa holding their newborn to funny photos of their growing baby son through the years, often with family.

I knew family photography didn’t have to be stuffy and serious. I didn’t want that to be a reflection of my own family.

I’ve always been a photographer and I’ve always been drawn to people’s stories.

It was natural that I became part of a pioneering movement that has helped shape photography as we know it today. The on location photographer that has sparked many a career. When I was embarking on my professional photography path the movement was just getting underway and I am so proud to have been a part of what shaped what it has become. A beautiful way for family life to be expressed in what we now call lifestyle photography. We didn’t have a solid name for it then but we do now. I am proud to have been part of that movement and continue to be.

My photography career naturally unfolded. When I worked in the ICU/CVICU at Naperville’s Edward Hospital I’d care for my patients and their families and in the wee hours, while everyone was asleep on those rare quiet nights I would gaze at the photos lining the walls and available spaces in the room of the critically ill. Hand drawn art from grandchildren, beautiful cards to those fighting for their lives. And the family photos.

Oh! The photos on display. In my mind’s eye I remember what it was like to be standing a room filled with IVs, ventilators, rapid blood transfusers, balloon pumps and being surrounded by real life. The images that mark time in that patient’s life before the presence of medication, IV fluid and assisted breathing.

Images of the patient not in the patient role but in the LIFE role. As the head of their households, as the grandparent, as a human, filled with life! The complete contrast to this person in bed (sometimes their death bed) who was fighting to breathe or for their heart to continue pumping or perhaps unconscious from a stroke or car accident or any other number of life threatening conditions that landed them in my unit of the hospital…

And it occurred to me that I was no longer ok bearing witness to illness and death, despite having a large role in fighting it off. No. My own near death experience after the birth of my second child made it so I was no longer okay with just bearing witness to illness and dying. That rush of adrenaline in helping save lives that fueled my nursing career in the first decade of my medical career was long gone. I was in survival mode trying to make sense of what happened to ME. I gazed upon the walls of my patients who had a life before they were nearly dead, lying here as my patient.

I was trying to make sense of my own life and nearly dying in the context of caring for the nearly dead.

And truth be told. My photographing my family healed me in ways that nursing never could. I appreciated the chance at being alive to be here with my daughters and watch them grow but the continued exposure to the critically ill was wearing on parts of my soul that were resilient and armored prior to nearly dying myself.

Working in the ICU was quietly killing me in ways my near death experience never did. I found myself more frequently quietly questioning the interventions I was obligated to take – whose good are we doing THESE interventions for? Often the answer was clear but often enough the answer was muddied in a variety of factors that are far too psychologically complicated to delve into in this mere photographer’s blog post of the story of pivoting in life and finding meaning in healing.

But those photos of those patients? Their memories lining their walls surrounding their sick beds? My own thoughts on personal photography and my evolving sense of who I was after nearly dying? Well photography gave me the answers I so desperately sought.

Photography saved me. Personally. Professionally and maybe even spiritually. It helped fulfill that part of myself that sat in nursing school that very first week (learning about gallbladders via a faux patient name Marsha) that questioned myself: “WHAT am I doing here? This isn’t even creative!!?!“

Photography has helped me create beautiful, quiet, movement filled imagery of my own children and family. Photography has helped me create beautiful, contemplative, movement filled imagery of other people’s children in my role as a Chicagoland family photographer.

Photography has helped save me during those times where I felt I no longer knew myself. It was a grounding force – a way to capture that elusive sand through the hourglass, to stop life, to stop time.

Photography became my weapon against mortality and I continue to wield it with an eye toward preserving moments for families worth remembering.

Chicagoland Family Photographer – preserving moments for families worth remembering

That conviction of wielding the camera as a weapon against mortality and the passage of time hasn’t changed. Not once in twenty years of photographing families across Chicagoland – at my locations in the southwest suburbs where we can often be found frolicking in fields or in streams or among the trees of the forest. Or when I’m photographing on location from the tree-lined streets of Chicago’s Old Town or within the charming homes in Glencoe and Winnetka to the open landscapes and preserved prairies of Naperville and Frankfort. From the downtown grandeur of Chicago’s architecture and again back to the quiet beauty of the southwest suburbs which are my landing spot, our family home.

In 20+ years what has really been the only change in the way I approach photography is the infrastructure surrounding my business. The technology. The industry. The landscape of how families find their photographers and how photographers find their clients. And yes – after years of personal circumstances that asked everything of me – Marmalade Photography itself went inward for a bit. Still photographing our dearest clients. Still creating the legacy of stopping time in its tracks. Doing the thing that brought life’s purpose back into my own life, catering to my clientele and serving them the best of what I had to offer with minimal focus on the noise and marching on of technology. Treading water was less about survival and more about intentionality and focus on what really matters.

And here we are. 20+ years after inception. With a new site. With a heartfelt and renewed commitment to creating photography worth saying: “This is an heirloom, THIS is a moment I want to remember. This is something worth walking by thousands of times during my daily life.”

With the same eye. With the same heart. With the same philosophy – but very much reflected upon through 20+ years – that has guided every session since 2005.

What Photography For Life Actually Means

Photography For Life isn’t a tagline I invented for a rebrand. It’s the result of contemplation on the most sacred parts of Marmalade Photography and what it has meant to me to become a Chicagoland family photographer of choice. Photography For Life is the most accurate description for why I created Marmalade Photography, for what I have done and still do for my clients.

It means something as simple as photographing a two-year-old hiding behind her mother’s legs at their first session with Marmalade – and then having the honor to photograph her senior portraits sixteen years later for a destination photography session at one of my favorite places in the world – my other piece of home.

It means forging meaningful, long term relationships in order to know your family so that when we meet again it is meeting up with an old friend. I have formed love for every client family that I have been stopping time for. It has allowed me to see people and relationships as they are and as they unfold as the family grows and matures.

It means being a photographer of choice for a family that has the ability to choose any photographer they want with the tools available to them to choose different – but instead they pick up the phone to call Marmalade. It means being part of a family’s legacy.

It also means understanding. Understanding that photographs in your home, on your walls, do a sort of quiet, daily work. Something that an image file on a hard drive in your digital world simply cannot do! The quiet work of visual reinforcement that the people in your life, in your home matter. That wall display of images from your family session when your now bigger kids were Littles? Your child has walked past those images maybe several thousand times and then one day they pause because they have a bad day and reflect on their own sense of belonging to something greater. Maybe it’s been a tough week for them during middle school…maybe the pause happens during a moment of doubt about life during their 20s…maybe something in one of those images of love surrounding them in their family home reminds them: I *am* loved. I belong to these people. They know me. I am here. I was here.

That’s not photography simply as home decor. That’s a piece that anchors a family member. It reminds them of the roots of who they are and where they come from and where they can always return to find comfort.

That is photography used as a weapon against mortal toil.

Twenty+ Years in the Making

When I became a Chicagoland family photographer having founded Marmalade Photography in 2005 the digital photo revolution was just starting to find its footing. As I mentioned before, I was working as an ICU RN who had spent years with people during their most critical moments – crisis, loss, the hardest days of their lives. I wanted to be part of the other end of the spectrum. Celebrating growth. Documenting joy. Preserving the fleeting. Preserving moments that cannot be captured again.

The early years with Marmalade were about building – a client base, a philosophy, a visual language that was distinctly mine. By 2011 that work had found recognition beyond my clientele in Chicagoland and beyond. I was honored to find myself among a very select few. A cover feature in Rangefinder Magazine! Image publication in National Geographic Traveler. Inclusion in Photographing Children by Wiley Publications (two editions). Writing equipment and software reviews for the print and online editions of Professional Photographer Magazine – and eventually earning a large feature by the magazine itself! I was busy – both writing about photography, creating photography for clients and my own family, teaching workshops and webinars, mentoring photographers from halfway around the world…it was a great era!

(sometimes I look back and wonder what brand of superhuman that version of me was…and why didn’t I bottle that multi-tasking mastery?! That truth? I promise you my home was in shambles and a disorganized mess and my husband picked up so much of my at-home-slack…that truth happens to be that I didn’t do it all alone without a support system behind me)

In that time I also built the PCP site – Professional Child Photographer – an educational platform I founded in 2007. That site took on a life of its own and grew fairly quickly. It became something larger than I’d imagined. Hundreds of photographers linking to it, sharing it, finding in it a voice that said what so many of us were thinking at the time as media influence tried to water down what a professional photographer does: professional photography is a serious craft, not a casual hobby.

And then in 2012 life asked more of me than I ever could imagine and certainly more than I had to give. Both my parents passed away within 10 months of each other. Huge weight on my shoulders as I was tasked to do what felt like an impossible job. Cleaning up generations long messes. Cleaning up 40+ years of my parents life complicated by Parkinsons and dementia and really messy family dynamics. Cleaning up my own untidy family messes. Supporting growing children. It was a personal rebuilding that took years and every ounce of what I could muster. There were many days where I had to remind myself: “this too shall pass” as every ounce of survival was measured and weighed and my sanity was tested time and time again.

But in terms of Marmalade? I photographed. I loved. I was in the moment and I kept on keeping on.

As a Chicagoland family photographer I continued to meet with clients. I continued to drive to destination client sessions and events. COVID happened sometime in all of this, because why not!?! A little more stress and havoc in that mix. And I kept doing the thing even when I found myself at the patient bedside again (this time in the home settings of hospice and home health). I kept doing Marmalade. I sort of loved every moment of this slowed-down-by-the-world period. I renewed my love of nursing, in a way, still not finding a permanent place in it but allowing it to come full circle in the home settings. Professionally for Marmalade? I clamped down on my social media. I didn’t update my sites. I treaded water where I could and what didn’t require too much of my energy and focused on what really mattered. Life. Documenting it. Witnessing it. Living it.

I’ll never apologize for the quiet years. They were necessary and deepened every singular thing I bring to my work now. Those quiet years allowed me to focus on what mattered and continues to matter.

“Don’t call it a comeback…”

As a Chicagoland family photographer “coming back” to Marmalade Photography wasn’t a once and done decision, mostly because I had never left, I just intentionally slowed. I was quietly navigating the waters of life and of my own identity as a mom to two now grown near adults…the changing landscape of being a woman in a youth obsessed society…coming full circle in a career I once trained for and studied for and was all too committed to…and sort of navigating the calmer landscape Marmalade Photography had intentionally become. I had my group of wonderful clients that kept me focused on what was most important to me: wielding that weapon against mortality via the camera. I quietly, inconspicuously (‘lowkey” as GenZ likes to say) photographed events, engagement sessions, teen sessions, senior sessions, family sessions, baby sessions…

I even lost a couple of long time wonderful clients in this era. Women who I admired for a multitude of reasons that became advocates for my business as I became huge fans of them. This is one of the most heartbreaking parts of the Marmalade story for me and something I don’t know if I can touch upon beyond the words I’ve already said. Losing dear clients/friends forever to illness and death is something that I really should discuss as it’s something that has affected Marmalade Photography as much as anything I’ve discussed but I’m just not ready to touch upon that yet.

In the ultimate sidequest: I taught high school during this era. This was quite a happy and celebratory part of my life. I love teaching and mentoring photographers and this allowed me to fulfill a couple of dreams I once had: of becoming a CNA (certified nurse assistant) instructor and to teach the high school set. Because when I say I love high school senior photography it’s partly because this is a favorite age of mine – this threshold age of about-to-become; teaching that age group solidified what I love about them most – the sense of wonderment of childhood still exists with a twist of knowledge of what they are about to embark upon as near adults.

This manifestation combo of work teaching highschool kids CNA skills just sort of fell into my lap, an opportunity I am forever grateful for and will never regret taking (I never regret taking opportunities and trying new things so I’m not sure why I framed it that way but we’ll leave it as is). I taught high school students what mattered most. YES, I taught nursing assistant skills that they later would take a state certification test for. Yes I taught them how to care for those that can no longer take care of themselves. But my biggest legacy of this era? I’m proud to say: I TAUGHT THEM LIFE.

I would be inclined to turn on music for the residents we were caring for (this was the COVID era, need I say more about those darkened days?) and we would dance and be silly for the residents’ benefit. I encouraged my students to get to know these people and their stories. To breathe life back into them. I encouraged them to remember why they are caring for people. It’s not just about the showers and the bed changes and the toileting…it’s about bringing life back to them, caring about them as much as caring for them. It’s about dancing with the gentleman who is wheelchair bound but can still move his upper body to dance along. It’s about sitting with the bedbound patient and asking them about their life’s story. It’s about quietly sitting with someone who appears to be non-verbal but then you see a light come back into their eyes because of you and your students daily presence and cheer bringing some light back into these sad spaces.

Teaching life to these young people? One of the best things ever. And it was only for a school year because I fulfilled my wish and I got to know these kids. Frankly? My heart was full. I was ready to be who I was before that era but with a renewed sense of who I was becoming. I also could not imagine a better set of kids to teach than I was blessed with that year. I loved those kids, they healed something inside me that I didn’t even know needed healing. Even when I had to play “bad cop” the few times and I couldn’t just be “Chill Mrs. Marianne”, I cherished my time mentoring those young people and reminding them of what matters.

LIFE.

Because I’ve figured it out. This is what I do. This is who I am. I photograph LIFE. I celebrate LIFE. I enjoy LIFE.

So when I remark that it’s not a comeback, I mean it. For me? It’s a renewal. Over twenty years of photographing Chicagoland families – those lovely North Shore mornings with golden morning light filtering off the lakefront and through oak trees. Gold Coast Chicago sessions with beautiful spring blossoms as a backdrop. Lincoln Park photo sessions with the beautiful architectural skyline of the city as a backdrop. Those crisp autumn afternoons that smell of burning leaves while photographing in the forest preserves of the southwest suburbs – that purpose doesn’t just disappear because life gets hard. Or the world stops. That work keeps going. LIFE keeps happening.

Life keeps happening to us. For us. Unfolding and becoming.

This new blog site you’re looking at right now and the entirely new Marmalade Photography website represents years of refining and rebuilding – not just technically but philosophically. Every page, every image, every word has been chosen intentionally. Because if I’m going to do this I’m going to do it right. It’s going to be authentic and heartfelt and filled with story and of life. Of my life. Of snippets of my client’s lives. It’s a celebration and a love letter. It’s heartfelt and it’s not geared toward “marketing” to the perfect audience and curating a feed. It’s about the messiness that is and has been and the beauty that comes from the mess. Or Phoenix rising. Or whatever analogy you want to insert here.

The galleries you’ll find on the website and within the posts on this blog span more than twenty years of work. Early sessions and recent ones, featuring babies and children who are now adults. Families who started as young couples and now have teenagers. The visual evidence of Photography For Life in practice. I am proud of every moment.

An Invitation

If you’re a family in Chicagoland – whether you’re in Lincoln Park or Lake Forest or Hinsdale or Highland Park, Naperville or Frankfort – and you’re looking for a Chicagoland family photographer who will bring over twenty years of knowledge, expertise, care, and a commitment to creating quality photography that you’ll want to display: I would love for you to get in touch.

And if you’re a past client finding your way back here – welcome home. I’ve missed you. Let’s make some new images together – I assure you: I remember the way your family smiled and the way your children made me giggle and how much my conversations with you about what really matters still resonate with me today.

Marmalade Photography – For Life. Still here. Still creating. Still believing in the work of heart and art. I once said: Childhood is art. Your life is art. Those words were as true then in 2005 as they are now. A Chicagoland family photographer of choice. Choosing photography of life every day.

As always, xoxo,
Mare / Marianne

Thank you for stopping by…if you enjoyed this post, visit our full site at Marmalade Photography for our full portfolio and to learn more about working with Marmalade Photography!