Howard Hamilton photographs under the name HaitcH. He grew up in the countryside of St. Catherine, Jamaica, and now lives in New Windsor, New York.
His subjects are nature and family, most often his own children. He believes family life is worth recording with care, for the joy it holds and the joy it can bring to anyone who looks. His pictures set people within the wider world around them: the road outside the house, a field of leaves, the shoreline.
He works on Sony, Nikon and Fujifilm cameras, and is available for event commissions and print enquiries.
I photograph people, mostly children, against the wide, plain surfaces of everyday life: roads, driveways, bleachers, snow, a lawn covered in leaves. The ground takes up most of the frame and the figure is small within it. That difference in scale is the subject.
A child cartwheeling down an empty path, or two toddlers alone on a bank of bleachers, looks the way childhood can feel from the inside: a great deal of space, and a small body learning how to move through it. The long shadows, the painted lines and the edges of kerbs do as much work as the people do.
Most of these pictures are of my own family, made in ordinary hours after school and at weekends. A smaller group was made in Jamaica, where I grew up, and in Greece. I include them because the same arrangement keeps appearing wherever I am: a person, a shadow, a surface.
What I look for is the moment the shape of a place and the gesture of a person line up — when a handstand fits a driveway, or a shadow runs exactly as long as the road.