09/03/2026
Sitting here with my coffee this morning reading through all of the comments, messages and reactions to yesterday’s post, and I feel like I want to explain a little more about how I got here.
Because this wasn’t a random social media change.
Over the past few months, I’ve been paying attention (and praying) to the court cases surrounding AI-generated child sexual abuse material and, more specifically, the questions courts are now having to answer about material that is entirely AI-generated versus material created or altered using images of real children.
And I think what has bothered me the most is realizing just how far technology has moved ahead of the laws meant to protect children from it.
We are quite literally watching courts try to determine how existing laws apply to things that weren’t even possible when many of those laws were written.
And I haven’t been able to shake that.
Because my job puts thousands and thousands of photographs into my hands every year.
Some of them are photographs of children.
Beautiful, innocent photographs of babies and kids simply existing in their childhood.
And the reality that I have had to sit with is that once I put one of those photographs publicly onto the internet, I lose control of it.
I can’t control who saves it.
I can’t control where it goes.
I can’t control what technology can do with it.
And I certainly can’t depend on our laws to have already anticipated every possible way it could be misused.
That is ultimately what changed things for me.
Could choosing not to publicly show identifiable images of children affect my business?
Yes.
Could it affect bookings? Absolutely.
Could it affect my income? Absolutely.
I work in a visual industry. My photographs are how people find me. They are how people decide whether they connect with my work. There is absolutely a business advantage to being able to show a beautiful newborn gallery or a family laughing together with all of their faces visible.
And there will be photographers who read the exact same court rulings, look at the exact same technology and come to a completely different decision than I have.
That’s okay.
I’m not making this decision for anyone else.
I’m making it because I had to ask myself what my responsibility is with the images that are entrusted to me.
And once children’s safety entered that equation, the rest became pretty insignificant.
An Instagram post isn’t more important.
Reach isn’t more important.
A booking isn’t more important.
Even my income isn’t more important.
I cannot stop AI from existing. I cannot control what our courts decide. I cannot make legislation move as quickly as technology does.
But I can control what I contribute to the public internet.
So for now, that means the children you see in my public work will be anonymous and faceless.
It means finding different ways to show childhood.
A newborn tucked into mama’s chest. Little fingers wrapped around dad’s. A toddler running away from my camera. Messy curls from behind. Movement and connection and all of those tiny pieces that tell you exactly what a moment felt like without needing to show you exactly who that child is.
My job has always been to preserve people’s stories.
I’m just realizing that sometimes being trusted with someone’s story also means knowing which pieces of it don’t need to belong to the entire internet.
And if protecting that costs me something as a business owner, I’m okay with that.
Because there isn’t a photograph in my portfolio worth more than the child in it. 🤍
