Meeting her, you can tell that family photographer Nicole Mayhorn is different. She’s not your average New Yorker: she is approachable, she’s calm, and she’s confident.
“Oh, so I’ve been in New York for I guess around 15 years or so,” Mayhorn reveals. Originally from Houston, Texas, Mayhorn now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. Following in the footsteps of her sister, Mayhorn had traveled from Houston to Washington, D.C. to attend Howard University. It was while majoring in advertising at Howard that she began studying photography.
She had started taking classes at the school of communications and, initially, the excitement came when she got to work on films and to write short stories and then film them.
“But then when I got a camera and I actually had more control, I fell in love,” she confesses. Instead of working with a large team to shoot scripts and later edit them, Mayhorn was taken with the idea that, “It was just me being able to control the creative narrative. I just fell in love with that.”
The more she learned about photography, the more pictures she took. “I was always taking pictures, you know, like of my family. I always had a camera and was documenting our family when they came over for Christmas and just around the house. It was so funny because my mom hates taking pictures, but then through me being a photographer, she’s just learned to tolerate it a little bit more.”
After college, Mayhorn thought about living and working in California. She did an internship at Hollywood’s Showtime Networks, but then took a position doing film distribution at 20th Century Fox in New York City. In 2009, she set up her own business, Nicole Mayhorn Photography (https://nicolemayhorn.com/), in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It quickly rose through word-of-mouth referrals. Mayhorn says she didn’t have a formal studio location at the time, so she sometimes had to rent one for her shoots. But she also loved taking photos in Fort Greene Park, throughout Dumbo, and at locations around New York where she could incorporate the beauty of the city.
Her photographs of families led to Mayhorn being asked to take children’s school photos. She has contracts to take the annual photos at 13 area schools each year. When she works with children, she likes to come in and really take the time to connect and meet her subjects. She said she sits and talks with them, asks them about their interests, and even brings a few toys to see how they interact with objects. “What I get from parents is they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness: You caught my child’s spirit! You caught them as who they are, I can see my child’s joy in your pictures.’ Because kids are so busy and they’re always moving and they’re like, ‘How do you get them all to do so many different poses?’”
Taking photos and framing the different poses of children and families in photographs is vital because it helps establish a sense of stability, Mayhorn argues. Just taking selfies and having pictures on your cell phone isn’t enough, “I really want my families to be able to celebrate their families and celebrate themselves as art. I think it’s really important for kids and for families to see their images on the wall, for them to be able to wake up each morning and walk in the living room or in the bedroom or in the hallway and see themselves framed in their home. You know, studies have shown that seeing framed pictures of yourself and your family just gives you more confidence because you’re seeing yourself being celebrated inside your house. And it’s also bringing back those good memories of that time, because then as you get older you still have those pictures framed.”
Mayhorn added that her goal is to celebrate the spirit of a person in a photograph. “People uniquely are so interesting,” she said, “and I just enjoy the joy that resides in people when they’re happy or when you can see that sparkle in their eye. Just being able to capture that memory and like freeze that moment for people, to feel and really see the joy of the person: that’s the kind of spirit-led photography I really enjoy doing, where I see their spirit shining through.”