A photograph does not change.
We do.
A child grows.
A family changes.
People arrive and leave.
Years pass.
And a photograph made long ago begins to mean something it could not have meant when it was taken.
Then & Now began with something very simple.
I started photographing people I had photographed years before. Sometimes decades before.
I thought I was looking at change.
I wasn't.
I was looking at what had remained.
A hand that once steadied a tiny boy.
A mother standing beside the daughter she once held.
Children now taller than their parents.
Families returning, year after year, to stand in front of the same black background.
The earlier portrait matters.
The portrait made now matters.
But something else exists between them.
Time.
And time changes what both photographs mean.
Some stories have unfolded in front of my camera for many years.
A baby becomes a child. A child becomes an adult. Families grow, change, move away and sometimes return.
These are their stories, told through portraits made over time.
Then & Now does not depend on recreating something that came before.
Sometimes there is an earlier portrait.
Sometimes there isn't.
The photograph we make today may simply become the Then.
That is the strange thing about photographs.
We never quite know what they will come to mean.
There are photographs that show how someone looked.
And there are photographs that hold what was lived.
JOHANNESBURG PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER
One Moment. One Portrait. Forever
© 2005–2026 Bridget Corke Photography
Blairgowrie · Johannesburg · South Africa
International Master's in Portrait Photography
One of only two in Africa.