It was a stiflingly hot day in the south of France and editor and photographer Gerry Brakus and her 15-year-old daughter, Honor, had gone indoors to cool off. Along with her husband – the couple are both half English, half French – and beloved dog Rudy, the cavapoo, they were holidaying near Avignon. “I spent a lot of my own childhood in France,” Brakus says, and when she photographed her daughter there, “my old childhood memories came rushing back – things I’d completely forgotten.”
“The French are very resistant to change, very traditionalist, so the interiors and colours have hardly moved on at all,” she adds. “I’m never deliberately looking for something that emulates my childhood; it’s just bizarre how similar it all is – like revisiting that time in vivid, high definition.”
Brakus used her iPhone 12 Pro Max and enhanced the colours slightly using the Snapseed app, but says the picture didn’t need anything further: “The gap between digital and phone cameras gets narrower all the time.”
With Honor now in her teens, Brakus is grateful that phone photography allows her to keep capturing her increasingly self-conscious daughter. While Honor gave permission for this shot to be published, Brakus explains: “I’m so drawn to documenting her adolescence, but it gets harder and harder to get her to agree. That’s why I started to use my phone a lot more. It allows me to be quieter, more subversive. The authenticity here would disappear if a digital camera started clicking and flashing.”
