I Want to be Your Time Machine
Well. I’m not sure what I can say that’s not already been said - and far more articulately - but I’m gonna give it a good go. Because, naturally, I’ve had some thoughts recently after a certain cabinet of dickheads suggested that the work I do wasn’t viable. That careers in the arts are somehow irrelevant; that the hours of love and care and training and attention to detail I put in are meaningless. I’ve been in a weird kind of mourning for our planet this year - I won’t deign to touch on ALL of the ills facing us but I CAN prattle on a bit about a worldview through the lens of someone recently told to get ‘better job’.
Because guys, louder for that same aforementioned cabinet of dickheads in the back THERE. IS. NO. BETTER. JOB.
And, as I have been doing for the past 6 years, I will continue to put my goddamn heart and soul into this incredible, beautiful, heart & backbreaking, emotional rollercoaster of a job that I love so so much. It took me nearly thirty years of aimless creative job-jumping to understand exactly what direction I wanted my life to go in and I’ll be damned if I let a pandemic take it from me. Because as it turns out, to the delight of my seven-year-old self, I’m Marty McFly and I’m a time machine.
This year, I've had to adapt and re-think what exactly Kate McCarthy Photography IS and what kind of a business I want it to be. It started as Squid & Pearl and I was shooting families and babies and mamas AND weddings. And then weddings became EVERYTHING. I lived and breathed the theatre and the pace and the exhilarating everything of weddings. But then the world stopped and I was like the roadrunner skidding to a halt just as I was REALLY getting going. And we postponed the big celebrations. We slowed down. We read more and baked bread and sometimes collapsed from the overwhelming ‘what-if’ of it all. But guess what?! The joy is still there, the love is still there. Babies are still being born and kids are still running wild and free and families still need these moments captured and preserved and I’m STILL a storyteller, I’m STILL Marty McFly. When I get to the heart of it, my work is ME - we are so inextricably intertwined that there is just no other option for me. There is never going to be a better job. So now it's back to basics - back to capturing ALL of that joy. Weddings are still happening, love is not cancelled, but I want to be along for the whole ride of your life - to capture ALL of the big moments, not just the beginning of the adventures.
So here’s my (slightly pathetic) plea: hire me! Book onto my mini-sessions, buy a voucher, have me come round to photograph your kids or your dog or your small business or, yes, even your micro-wedding! I have time and I want to capture yours! The fancy-pants family brochure is FINALLY back on the website and below are some of the beautiful humans who have welcomed me along.
The world may be on fire but it’s still turning. Your children are still growing up far too fast and these moments are just so gut-wrenchingly fleeting. Let me be your time machine.
“Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
”
