Blog | Jakob Berr Photography

Yesterday I went to church with Valeria and her granddaughters. I had joined them before, but didn’t really like the pictures I came back with. With the way the church is set up, it’s hard to get a telling image. A low ceiling, a row of columns along the middle of the room, fluorescent light in the main room and tungsten in the altair room all make photographing in the building a virtual nightmare. This shoot went better than the first one, however, and I guess I’ll just have to come to terms with the fact that this is the most I can get out of this situation.

The congregation is quite small, with maybe 40 to 50 regular attendants.

Valeria makes it a point to highlight sections in her bible that the pastor talks about in his sermons.

Valeria talks to her pastor after service.

Yesterday Dreisha and Drejanay finally came home from their summer vacation at their uncle’s place in Oklahoma. Valeria got so excited to see them that she and Paul drove all the way out to her sister’s place in Glasgow, Mo., where her brother and the girls would stop on his way to Columbia.

Valeria’s brother is a slow driver, so she and Paul spent about an hour and a half waiting and chatting at her aunt’s place down the road until he finally arrived with the girls.

The first hug in several weeks.

Back home in Columbia, Dreisha and Drejanay couldn’t wait to see their new rooms…

…and were excited about the new decoration.

Two customers of Colombo’s Cafe & Tavern in St. Louis hunt for big bucks last night…

Once a year when the Dreisha and Drejanay are out of town on vacation, Valeria redecorates their rooms. Tediously, she puts glow-in-the-dark stars, Michael Jackson posters, butterflies and – most important of all – a lot of pictures of her daugher Angela in place. She says it’s important to keep the girls’ memory of their mother alive. Paul helped Valeria with the redecoratoin this year, and they asked me over to take pictures.

One of the foster children (name withheld) carries an old picture of Valeria’s children Chris and Angela upstairs.

A picture of Angela sits on the bed as Valeria sifts through memorabilia of her granddaughters’ childhood.

I like this one and the next one a lot. They are two moments from a series of about 15 pictures that I want to include in the project as a time lapse.

My favorite shot of the day. It may be blurred and noisy, but I love the moment between Valeria and Paul. After dinner, they were all excited to go upstairs to see the glow-in-the-dark stars lit. Valeria laid down on Drejanay’s bed and became quiet when all of a sudden Paul sat down next to her and hugged her.