Denise Jones and her sisters knew it was time to think about selling the house. Their dad, Don Masters, had moved to an assisted care facility and was in hospice. The house in Norman, Oklahoma, where he’d lived for 64 years, and where the three sisters had grown up, was sitting empty.
“My mom passed away four years ago,” says Jones, 57. “My dad had been living on his own in this simple little ranch house — the only childhood home my sisters and I knew.”
Jones says she and her sisters struggled over what to do. “The house was still his house,” she says. “You have to say goodbye to so many things with health and age, we just didn’t feel ready to say goodbye. But it was coming to the point where he wasn’t going to come back to the house, and we needed to at least start cleaning it out.”
Jones, who lives in Nashville, and her sisters made plans to meet at their dad’s house and start the long process of divvying up keepsakes and deciding what to do with all the possessions. But they also planned to secure another kind of keepsake, before anything was packed away: professional photos of the house, just as their dad had left it.
The family reached out to Shreveport, Louisiana-based photographer Hector Manuel Sanchez, 57, who specializes in such photo shoots. The images he would capture at Jones’s childhood home are the latest in his “Portrait of a Place” series, which he began a few years ago after being asked to photograph a home in Pennsylvania.
“My best friend in college, my buddy Henders, let me know his grandmother was hospitalized after a stroke and she wouldn’t be going back to her house,” Sanchez says. His friend had spent a lot of time at Grandma Dot’s and wanted to find a way to preserve the warmth that filled her home. “I asked if I could go photograph it the way his grandmother left it,” Sanchez says.
In Sanchez’s shots of Grandma Dot’s house, a puzzle sits nearly finished on a table. There’s a small pot on the stove and a dish towel draped over the edge of the sink, just as Dot had left it.
When Jones asked Sanchez to photograph her dad’s house, she hoped he’d capture a similar moment in time.
“Once we started clearing out, I knew the house wouldn’t feel like it did,” she says. “Hector took a photo of the rack with my dad’s hats still hanging and the little table and chairs where he and my mom would sit. It looks like he just got up and went into the kitchen or something — that’s what I see — and it’s beautiful.”
Sanchez also specializes in interior, architecture and design photography. His “Portrait of a Place” series, he says, is not just about memorializing a loved one, but also preserving the little details in a space that many people never think to photograph. “There are so many visual pieces of our childhoods, our grandparents’ and parents’ houses,” he says, “and those places are gone now, except for in our memory.”
During a shoot, Sanchez wanders through the home, taking shots of things that reflect the homeowner’s personality. “It’s a pretty intimate thing,” he says. “I’m literally photographing someone’s closet or bathroom, just as they left it.”
Jones and her sisters also pointed out items they wanted memorialized in Sanchez’s photos. “It’s the random things I’m going to remember about my home,” she says. “The cabinet with the lazy Susan in it, and down at the bottom is my mom’s Tupperware and the Crock-Pot. The cubby in the hallway where the telephone used to be, with a cord that stretched all the way down the hallway to our bedrooms.”
At first Jones was hesitant about hiring Sanchez.
“My dad’s home wasn’t a showroom,” she says. “It’s a small house, and with all those lived-in years, there’s stuff that’s just piled up. I wouldn’t want anyone to come in and see it, let alone have professional photos taken.”
But then, Jones says, she had an epiphany: “That’s the point, that it was lived-in. That’s why you want a picture of the unorganized Tupperware.”
Sanchez is frequently hired to shoot newly built spaces. But those spaces, he says, don’t accurately represent most homes. “Especially with social media, Instagram and TikTok, you see all these influencers and perfect spaces that are apparently ‘supposed’ to be the way we live,” he says. “But that’s just not true. It’s okay to have clutter, and it’s okay to see somebody’s clutter.”
The benefit of hiring a professional, rather than just snapping photos with your phone, Jones says, “is the art side of what they do. They can see past the junk, see the way the light comes in on it or something, and it makes it look really cool.”
Megan Rego, a 36-year-old photographer in Fall River, Massachusetts, sets aside time each month for discounted shoots she calls “Olivia Sessions,” after her late grandmother. Some of her clients’ favorite photos, she says, are of often-overlooked details.
“I might see something they’ve stopped noticing,” she says. “Then years later they’re looking at it like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I remember this exact thing.’”
Though some of Rego’s shoots are aimed at preserving memories of homes, others focus on the people in them. She acts like a “fly on the wall,” she says, while her subjects interact — cooking, listening to music or looking through photo albums, for example.
“People forget certain things, like where the coffee pot was, how she touched something, the weird doorknob. That’s the stuff that’s unique to your life,” Rego says. “I’m preserving all that. It’s not just pretty pictures and sitting and smiling. It’s how you see your person every day. To me, that’s what photography is — freezing that time.”
For many people, Sanchez says, it’s too late to photograph a childhood home or an elder’s house as it once was. “But it doesn’t have to be a house,” he says. “It could be a tree house, a backyard, a family lake cottage. Just a place you and your family spent a lot of time.”
Even if you — or your space — don’t necessarily feel “camera ready,” Jones says, the resulting images, and the memories they preserve, are worth having. “My biggest encouragement is to just do it. Maybe get all your cousins on board, go in on it and do it together,” says Jones, who plans to have Sanchez’s photos of her childhood home bound into books for herself and her siblings.
Their dad died in early August, and the photos have already been a source of comfort, Jones says. “Our upbringing was not about a big house with a lot of things,” she says. “It was about what happened in our home around a piano, around a kitchen table. We were blessed to have it, and these photos capture that for me.”
Jones’s most important advice: “Do it before they’re gone. Don’t wait until it’s all cleaned up and emptied out. Do it while the junk is there, the piles of things. Do it before it all changes.”
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