Legacy Photography and Effective Collaboration: What’s the Connection?

Serving complex family enterprises requires advisors who can work together to accomplish each family’s goals. As I look to partner with other professionals whose skills complement mine, my antennae perk up when I encounter others with a similar approach to collaborative problem solving and decision-making.

So, I was delighted to meet Natalie White, a photographer who excels in creating portraits of families to preserve their legacy. Natalie reached out to me via LinkedIn, and we have since spoken at length about her work and her process.

Natale begins each engagement by meeting with the family to understand their context and desired outcomes. She wants to understand the structure of the family, their current situation, their interests, and their motivations for capturing images of themselves now and in the future. Understanding the family story is essential to her work.

She asks questions and uses her empathy to elicit this information. Then, before ever picking up a camera, she helps the family to consider the implications. Together, the family decides what they want the photographs to accomplish, where they want them taken, what sort of background is appropriate, what will they be doing, and what will they wear. To assist them, she makes suggestions and offers options based on her vast experience working with families, from small conjugal families to multi-generational clans.

Families may choose to have pictures of parents and children, siblings, cousins, all children of the rising generation, etc. Portraits can be casual or formal, printed on paper or painted with oil on canvas. The final product may hang on a wall or be compiled into an album.

Just we all must learn to walk before we can run, Natalie’s process builds the family’s capacity. She provides each family with an opportunity to practice defining what they want and determining the steps necessary to accomplish it.

This suggests that capturing images using a systematic process could be an effective step in preparing a family for progressively more complex collaborative problem solving and decision-making challenges.