Dear Friends,

When we started talking about creating a collaborative project focused on documentary family photography in late 2014 we had no idea where it would lead. Lacey, Natasha, and I had taken part in the same online workshop but never worked together in any meaningful way. Nor had we worked with any of the original contributors who virtually raised their hands in the Visual Storytelling Alumni Facebook group when we asked if anyone wanted to contribute to this project we were developing. It was a project that could have completely exploded in our face from the outset. We knew that. And because we knew that, we only committed to completing a 1 year cycle of the project- 52 weeks of blog posts with pictures on free wordpress site.

At that time documentary family photography, as a business model, was just starting to gain momentum, but was still fairly unknown in a broad sense. However, it was clearly something that really struck a nerve with the photographic community as the moment we announced the project we were quickly flooded with emails from photographers asking how they could be involved and if we had contributor spaces still available. Our Facebook fan page quickly grew to the thousands. With each new email and each new collection of Facebook notifications Lacey, Natasha and I would message each other a bit more confident that we had something special in the making.

Then, in June of 2016 Babycenter reached out to us and asked to feature our project. After their feature was published we received an email from Huffington Post asking to feature the project as well. The Huffington post piece was published in July and quickly went pretty viral. We were fielding multiple emails from other blogs, news outlets, and parents who connected with the project (as well as a few of those who still thought our images were “too pretty” in one capacity or another). We found write ups on our project all over from New Zealand, to Germany, and even a blog post on a website out of Basque Country.

All the while, each year Lacey, Natasha and I would meet via video chat to talk about if we wanted to continue one more year, what worked, what didn’t, what we wanted to try next, what the expectations for the following year would be, and so on. Then we would bring those concepts to our contributors. Some ideas were excellent. A lot of them weren’t. There were several behind the scenes abject failures and miscommunications. We are so thankful that this group of women we have worked with over the past few years are such patient, compassionate, and dedicated individuals who have been willing to put up with loads of trial and error.

Which brings us to now, 350 some odd blog posts later, during 2018 Lacey stepped back from her leadership role with the project and in the fall Natasha and I came to the decision that the project was close to running its course. We have been honored and humbled and so so fortunate to work with all the wonderful photographers over the past 4 years. There is something really unique about never meeting someone in person but watching their family grow and change through photos over the years. Between 2015 and now we’ve had contributors move, build homes, and renovate. We’ve experienced the loss of pregnancies, family members, friends, pets, and separations between spouses. We’ve also had 4 babies and one grandbaby born during the course of this project. Professionally and personally all our lives have taken twists and turns resulting in a slowed momentum with Sham of the Perfect and the desire to see this project close conscientiously, rather than fizzle out.

2019 will be our last of actively running this project. However, we will be keeping the website up and running for at least a few years to come. We will continue our weekly posts this year as well as a few special posts from our contributors. We will also still keep our submissions open for blog features, so if you’ve been considering submitting now is the time to do so! We hope to make this last year one giant farewell party to a project that has been so special to us and we hope you will stick around and join us.

We very sincerely thank you for being a part of this journey!

Warmly,

Erika Roa, Lacey Monroe, Natasha Kelly
& All the Sham of the Perfect Contributors