Chronograph brings together more than twenty-five years of photographs made by
photographer Nick Haymes between 2001 and 2026, assembling an immersive
chronicle of life with his partner, Lina, and their two children, Philipp and
Lawrence. Over 450 pages and nearly one thousand images, the book moves between
Los Angeles and New York, turning Haymes’s long-term documentary practice
towards those closest to him. Approaching family life not as a sentimental saga
but as something psychologically charged and contradictory, the photographs move
between scenes of children, domestic interiors, bodies in motion, rough play,
affection, and moments of tension. Haymes refuses to separate beauty from
discomfort: innocence sits alongside recklessness, intimacy alongside unease, as
children grow, relationships shift, and bodies change. His photographic language
moves between documentary and carefully staged tableaux, creating images that
feel both spontaneous and strangely theatrical. Rather than presenting family as
a fixed social unit, Chronograph reveals it as a volatile emotional terrain
where closeness can feel both protective and suffocating. The result is a deeply
moving psychological portrait of family life, where affection and conflict
intertwine and where the fragile bonds of love are continually tested and
renewed.
