Photographer Nick Haymes documents his sons' lives from infancy to adulthood in intimate family chronicle

The morning of September 11th, 2001, Nick Haymes watched the towers burn from his apartment in New York. He was thirty years old, trying to build a photography career, living in a city that suddenly felt fragile. His friend Lina, a Jewish refugee from Ukraine who had arrived in America as a teenager, was navigating the wreckage of a failed marriage. The catastrophe clarified something for both of them: life was shorter than they'd assumed. They decided to marry and have children.

Twenty-five years later, Haymes has published a book called Chronograph. It is, in essence, a visual record of everything that happened next—his two sons, Philipp and Lawrence, growing from infants into men. The photographs span from those early 2000s through the present day, and they do not look away from anything. There are images of bloody noses and ear infections, of arms in casts and beloved pets being buried in cardboard boxes. There are shots of the boys at their least photogenic: crying, naked, sullen. There are also the ordinary rituals of childhood—birthday parties, first days of school, the slow arrival of adolescence with its bleached hair and tattoos and stubble.

The apartment where most of this unfolded was tiny—eight hundred square feet in Manhattan. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to retreat. Haymes had his camera with him constantly, and his children grew accustomed to its presence the way other kids grow accustomed to a sibling. Lawrence once joked that his father would photograph him mid-tears rather than put the camera down and actually help. Haymes admits the charge had some truth to it, though he insists he was attentive as a parent. The camera was simply always there, documenting the texture of ordinary life: verrucas, messy kitchens, his wife cleaning earwax with a cotton bud.

When the boys reached their teens, they discovered an elegant form of rebellion. Instead of sulking or turning away from the lens—the obvious teenage response to a photographer father—they smiled directly at the camera and gave thumbs up, knowing this was precisely what would make him stop. It was their way of telling him to leave them alone, and he understood the message perfectly.

Haymes himself had arrived at photography through an unconventional path. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he'd dropped out of art school after struggling with drugs and a breakdown in his twenties. He couch-surfed in London before finding work in a photo studio, eventually assisting the renowned photographer Jürgen Teller. In 1999, he packed two cameras and flew to New York on instinct. Lina, working at a magazine, gave him a commission that allowed him to secure a visa and stay.

Before Chronograph, Haymes had built a reputation for long-form documentary work. Between Dog and Wolf followed young skateboarders across California and Oklahoma. Gabe TM tracked the life of Gabe Nevins, a teenager in Gus Van Sant's film Paranoid Park, and unexpectedly documented his descent into homelessness and addiction. Dancing on the Fault Line, published in 2024, followed Love Bailey and her queer family over many years, including her transition in her thirties. Haymes remains close to his former subjects—he photographed Bailey's wedding; Gabe is living a stable life in Oregon now; the skaters have children of their own. He doesn't plan these deep attachments. They simply happen. He gets close to people, becomes part of their lives, sometimes serves as a father figure or therapist. It is, he says, part of how he learns to understand people.

The family photographs were initially just for memory and self-examination. In the early 2000s, digital photography was displacing film work, and Haymes found himself increasingly unemployable. He became, by necessity and then by choice, a house husband. The family life around him became his subject. It was only during the pandemic, sorting through decades of negatives, that he considered publishing them. The work moved him deeply, though he was careful not to let sentiment overtake the project.

The book's emotional weight comes not just from watching children grow, but from watching his in-laws, Nadia and Mikhail, age and decline. Mikhail appears in one memorable image wearing a tracksuit and wrapping paper on his head, radiating a slightly menacing charm. Nadia had her own struggles, possibly undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and became dependent on prescription medication in ways that required the family's intervention. For two grueling years, Haymes and Lina drove both of them to dialysis appointments. Eventually, he converted the home art gallery into a hospice. The photographs show them in hospital beds, their bodies failing in parallel. In the book's narrative, they appear to die together. In reality, they died a year apart, and by then they had divorced. Haymes chose not to include these complications. "There are things that don't need to be known," he says. "Everybody has a family album, and through those you only remember certain parts."

Despite the divorce, Nadia and Mikhail were buried together in Los Angeles. The book ends with Philipp and Lawrence standing at the graveside with the urn, surrounded by funeral flowers. For Haymes, watching his sons speak at the service and articulate their grief marked a threshold. They had become men. The project, which began with the death of a nation and the birth of a family, had come full circle. "The book starts with death and ends with death," he says. "It's gone full circle." Then he laughs, the particular laugh of a father who knows his sons are grown but will never quite be independent. They're still on his Uber account.