‘I saw the reflection of his back rolls in the glass door’: Spencer Ostrander’s best phone photo

On a sunny Sunday morning in June, Spencer Ostrander returned from the local hardware store to find his wife, Sophie, gardening in their back yard in Brooklyn, New York. “I handed her the supplies she needed, and a hot coffee, and she handed over our son,” Ostrander says. Their boy, Miles, was six months old at the time.

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“As I was taking him inside, I saw the reflection of my son’s back rolls in the glass door.” Ostrander grabbed his iPhone 14 Pro and turned the front camera on. “He was teething back then; not crying, but not his usual pleasant self either. I was juggling a wiggling baby and my phone, so I could only take two frames.”

The family’s day continued with what Ostrander describes as “a full range of unbridled infant emotions and immediate urgencies. Amid the chaos of caring for a baby, I had forgotten I had taken the shot until I opened my phone later that night.”

Now, Ostrander refers to this image as a time marker, a moment that captures the differences between their two bodies. “The contrasts – of our sizes and my hairy, dry, tanned arm next to his smooth, fleshy rolls – feels like the most important part of this photo to me,” he says. “I take photos because I have an obsessive need to document the people and things around me. I rarely think about how my photos will be perceived but, of course, I hope an outsider will feel the intimacy of my images and be stirred with emotion.”