A Letter from Kaydee

There's a particular kind of love that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it. The way you can be completely inside an ordinary moment with your child; bath time, a car journey, them talking at you about something you're only half following... and suddenly it catches you. How specific they are. How completely themselves. And underneath the love, something quieter. A kind of hurt you can't quite name, because they're still right there, they're fine, nothing is wrong. You're just already missing a version of them that hasn't left yet.

I think you probably carry that feeling more than you let on.

My mother was from Ireland, with stories woven into her bones. She'd sit with me and tell tales passed down through generations... brave girls who faced dark forests and emerged stronger, magic that lived in ordinary people waiting to be discovered, heroines who looked a lot like me. And alongside the stories, there were photographs. Of me. Kept carefully, returned to often, offered back to me like evidence. This is who you are. Look. Do you see it? Together, the stories and the images, they built something in me that I've stood on ever since. The unshakeable sense that I was seen. That someone had thought me worth cherishing.

You are the heroine of your own story, she'd say. Kind. Brave. Powerful. Don't ever forget it.

I never did.

When I became a photographer, I understood eventually what I was actually trying to do. Not capture children's portraits... tell their stories. To give mothers who love as fiercely as mine did a way to make that love into something real and lasting. Something with weight. Something their child can hold in their hands at seven, at seventeen, at thirty-seven, and know without question... without doubt... that they are seen. That they are magic. That someone stopped and paid attention and thought them worth cherishing too.

That's what Little Pixies is. Not a studio, really. The thing my mother did for me, made into a place.

A place where children are simply, completely themselves. Where a little girl sees herself in the mirror and stands a little taller. Where a boy who hates having his photo taken forgets that he does. Where mothers find themselves at the back of the room crying tears they didn't see coming.

That moment is why I do this.

I don't know that I fit neatly into what the world expects a photographer to be. Sometimes it feels like I'm swimming against a tide of trends. But I've stopped needing to fit. Because the families who find their way here understand that this season is unrepeatable, that these small people are only this small once... and that love this big deserves to exist somewhere beyond memory.

If something in this letter felt like it was written for you... maybe it was. And maybe this is the right place for you, too.

Warm wishes,

Kaydee