ニック・ヘイムズ:「非イベントこそが最も重要」

Nick Haymes didn’t set out to make a photo book spanning 25 years. “I reached a point in my career where it wasn’t really going anywhere, so I became a stay-at-home dad,” he reveals over Zoom. “I still wanted to take photographs, though, and the immediate thing around me was my family.” What began, almost incidentally, became Chronograph, his latest publication with SPBH Editions, an imprint of MACK books. Bringing together photographs of three protagonists – his wife Lina and their two sons, Philipp and Larence – taken over two and a half decades, it has the warmth of a family album and the editorial distance of a monograph, sitting somewhere in between.

Born in the UK and now based in LA, Haymes has spent his career photographing youth cultures over long stretches of time. His 2025 photo book Dancing on the Fault Line is a 14-year chronicle of the entertainer Love Bailey; 2021’s The Last Survivor Is the First Suspect follows two teenage skaters over four years. Now, the camera turns inwards for his longest and most personal project yet. “It was definitely the most heartbreaking one to do because all of it is gone. […] you see things grow at a rate that’s almost catastrophic.” He pauses. “It was pretty painful at times.”

Across almost 450 pages and 1,000 images, Haymes documents the intimacy of family life. “I can never make a resolution with a single image. I use photography as a sort of language,” he says. “Remember looking at books as a child and your family member would read them to you. You didn’t know the words, but it made complete sense when you saw the images.” His narrative works in much the same way, unfolding through multiplicity to create this familial photographic epic.

The book opens with four photographs taken on 11 September 2001, which appear before the title page. Haymes had just moved to New York and lived a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center. The images are shot from street level. Smoke rises into a clear sky. “I was right there. I remember opening the curtains, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and this thing is happening, and you didn’t really know what it was. News was travelling sort of slowly. […] I didn’t have a telephone, nobody heard from me for three or four hours, and Lina came down there to look for me.” He remembers the optimism of the new millennium, then its abrupt alteration: “I think the 21st century took a strange downturn after that time, but it was also that point, for me, that made me realise I wanted to be with my wife. […] We took matters into our own hands and started our own family.” These images are hard to look at, but harder to look away from. 

The scale then contracts as the book moves from public catastrophe into the chronology of a young family, its milestones and rituals punctuating the calendar: the birth of their second son, numerous birthdays (I counted six), Halloween costumes, Christmases and family holidays. Alongside are the quotidian moments: nosebleeds, lost baby teeth, broken bones, bathtimes at different ages, and the life and eventual death of a pet hamster. 

There’s a noticeable but perhaps subconscious preoccupation with interiors and the textures of domesticity – the bedlinen, the patterned upholstery, the rooms that stage their lives. Haymes remembers their Manhattan apartment, 800 square feet for four people. “There was no escaping anything, the camera was always there.” In one image, Lina stretches across an orange satin sofa surrounded by a velvet throw. There are wooden floorboards, and a tiny plastic toy beside her feet. Her parents appear too, as supporting actors in their nuclear family play, having moved to Brighton Beach from Ukraine in the 1990s. In one image, Lina’s father is pictured in his underwear, a grandson tucked under each arm, one face smeared with chocolate.

Page by page, you watch Haymes’ boys become men. Personal styles emerge. Tattoos appear. Hair colour changes from brown to pink to peach to blonde. “I look at it as a bit of a coming-of-age story of my sons.” Haymes has long been drawn to that interval when childhood has passed but adulthood has not yet arrived. “There is a sort of unsettled tension, but also a sense of optimism.” His own adolescence played out in Stratford-upon-Avon. “I was pretty reckless and restless,” he says. He dropped out of art school in Surrey, “took too many drugs” and fell into rave culture. At 24, he discovered his love of photography through a job at a studio, where he met and later worked for Juergen Teller. Now, with sons of 28 and 24 years old, Haymes seems to have entered a second adolescence of his own. “I can have my midlife crisis,” he laughs. “I paint my nails, wear anime T-shirts. Everything that I did 20 years or so ago!”

There is only one photograph of Haymes himself in the book, a quarter-page image taken by his son on his wedding day. “It’s just the back of my head, when I had a little bit of hair.” Susan Sontag writes in On Photography (1977) that “through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself, a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.” Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1980), describes the camera as an umbilical cord, connecting the body of the photographer to his subjects. Both ideas feel apt to Haymes, for whom the camera is less an instrument for observation than a means of participation. “It’s a complicated thing, a camera,” he says. “Because it’s just this machine, but emotionally for me, it is a way of being with people, communicating. […] It’s mechanical, it’s chemical, but it does these wonderful things.”

“Family books became a bit of a weird subgenre within the strange ghetto of photography,” Haymes admits. Publishing director of MACK Books Bruno Ceschel first saw the work in the mid-2000s. Haymes kept photographing without knowing what it would become. “He bugged me every five or ten years,” Haymes explains. “But I think I was starting to fathom concepts of time, and my own fear of death. With Lina’s parents’ passing, it felt like there were conclusions to the project.” The earlier photograph of the children with their grandfather returns, now on an easel at his funeral. Here, the book folds back on itself, collapsing its very chronology.

By the time he printed the work, the archive had reached 45,000 images. Throughout the process he has learned “that everybody needs some sort of family to be a part of. It could be chosen, or the one you’re born into, but you need to find people that are your people. That’s why I like to be with people to take photographs. The fear of being alone is something quite horrifying … This is like therapy,” he laughs, before continuing: “I wish I’d photographed people more, and I photographed them a lot anyway. The non-events are the most important.”

To mark the publication, Haymes is staging an installation at Graces Mews, open from 3–12 September, with an accompanying slideshow of the images from the book. “Nan has cracked that one,” he jests. À la Goldin, Chronograph subverts the family album and elevates it to an artistic plane. The result is not a record of what happened, but rather a document of having been there. A photo book-slash-photo album; part family epic, part artistic feat. Entirely felt and gloriously lived.

Chronograph (SPBH Editions, 2026) by Nick Haymes is published by MACK and out now.

Nick Haymes didn’t set out to make a photo book spanning 25 years. “I reached a point in my career where it wasn’t really going anywhere, so I became a stay-at-home dad,” he reveals over Zoom. “I still wanted to take photographs, though, and the immediate thing around me was my family.” What began, almost incidentally, became Chronograph, his latest publication with SPBH Editions, an imprint of MACK books. Bringing together photographs of three protagonists – his wife Lina and their two sons, Philipp and Larence – taken over two and a half decades, it has the warmth of a family album and the editorial distance of a monograph, sitting somewhere in between.

Born in the UK and now based in LA, Haymes has spent his career photographing youth cultures over long stretches of time. His 2025 photo book Dancing on the Fault Line is a 14-year chronicle of the entertainer Love Bailey; 2021’s The Last Survivor Is the First Suspect follows two teenage skaters over four years. Now, the camera turns inwards for his longest and most personal project yet. “It was definitely the most heartbreaking one to do because all of it is gone. […] you see things grow at a rate that’s almost catastrophic.” He pauses. “It was pretty painful at times.”

Across almost 450 pages and 1,000 images, Haymes documents the intimacy of family life. “I can never make a resolution with a single image. I use photography as a sort of language,” he says. “Remember looking at books as a child and your family member would read them to you. You didn’t know the words, but it made complete sense when you saw the images.” His narrative works in much the same way, unfolding through multiplicity to create this familial photographic epic.

The book opens with four photographs taken on 11 September 2001, which appear before the title page. Haymes had just moved to New York and lived a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center. The images are shot from street level. Smoke rises into a clear sky. “I was right there. I remember opening the curtains, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and this thing is happening, and you didn’t really know what it was. News was travelling sort of slowly. […] I didn’t have a telephone, nobody heard from me for three or four hours, and Lina came down there to look for me.” He remembers the optimism of the new millennium, then its abrupt alteration: “I think the 21st century took a strange downturn after that time, but it was also that point, for me, that made me realise I wanted to be with my wife. […] We took matters into our own hands and started our own family.” These images are hard to look at, but harder to look away from. 

The scale then contracts as the book moves from public catastrophe into the chronology of a young family, its milestones and rituals punctuating the calendar: the birth of their second son, numerous birthdays (I counted six), Halloween costumes, Christmases and family holidays. Alongside are the quotidian moments: nosebleeds, lost baby teeth, broken bones, bathtimes at different ages, and the life and eventual death of a pet hamster. 

There’s a noticeable but perhaps subconscious preoccupation with interiors and the textures of domesticity – the bedlinen, the patterned upholstery, the rooms that stage their lives. Haymes remembers their Manhattan apartment, 800 square feet for four people. “There was no escaping anything, the camera was always there.” In one image, Lina stretches across an orange satin sofa surrounded by a velvet throw. There are wooden floorboards, and a tiny plastic toy beside her feet. Her parents appear too, as supporting actors in their nuclear family play, having moved to Brighton Beach from Ukraine in the 1990s. In one image, Lina’s father is pictured in his underwear, a grandson tucked under each arm, one face smeared with chocolate.

Page by page, you watch Haymes’ boys become men. Personal styles emerge. Tattoos appear. Hair colour changes from brown to pink to peach to blonde. “I look at it as a bit of a coming-of-age story of my sons.” Haymes has long been drawn to that interval when childhood has passed but adulthood has not yet arrived. “There is a sort of unsettled tension, but also a sense of optimism.” His own adolescence played out in Stratford-upon-Avon. “I was pretty reckless and restless,” he says. He dropped out of art school in Surrey, “took too many drugs” and fell into rave culture. At 24, he discovered his love of photography through a job at a studio, where he met and later worked for Juergen Teller. Now, with sons of 28 and 24 years old, Haymes seems to have entered a second adolescence of his own. “I can have my midlife crisis,” he laughs. “I paint my nails, wear anime T-shirts. Everything that I did 20 years or so ago!”

There is only one photograph of Haymes himself in the book, a quarter-page image taken by his son on his wedding day. “It’s just the back of my head, when I had a little bit of hair.” Susan Sontag writes in On Photography (1977) that “through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself, a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.” Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1980), describes the camera as an umbilical cord, connecting the body of the photographer to his subjects. Both ideas feel apt to Haymes, for whom the camera is less an instrument for observation than a means of participation. “It’s a complicated thing, a camera,” he says. “Because it’s just this machine, but emotionally for me, it is a way of being with people, communicating. […] It’s mechanical, it’s chemical, but it does these wonderful things.”

“Family books became a bit of a weird subgenre within the strange ghetto of photography,” Haymes admits. Publishing director of MACK Books Bruno Ceschel first saw the work in the mid-2000s. Haymes kept photographing without knowing what it would become. “He bugged me every five or ten years,” Haymes explains. “But I think I was starting to fathom concepts of time, and my own fear of death. With Lina’s parents’ passing, it felt like there were conclusions to the project.” The earlier photograph of the children with their grandfather returns, now on an easel at his funeral. Here, the book folds back on itself, collapsing its very chronology.

By the time he printed the work, the archive had reached 45,000 images. Throughout the process he has learned “that everybody needs some sort of family to be a part of. It could be chosen, or the one you’re born into, but you need to find people that are your people. That’s why I like to be with people to take photographs. The fear of being alone is something quite horrifying … This is like therapy,” he laughs, before continuing: “I wish I’d photographed people more, and I photographed them a lot anyway. The non-events are the most important.”

To mark the publication, Haymes is staging an installation at Graces Mews, open from 3–12 September, with an accompanying slideshow of the images from the book. “Nan has cracked that one,” he jests. À la Goldin, Chronograph subverts the family album and elevates it to an artistic plane. The result is not a record of what happened, but rather a document of having been there. A photo book-slash-photo album; part family epic, part artistic feat. Entirely felt and gloriously lived.

Chronograph (SPBH Editions, 2026) by Nick Haymes is published by MACK and out now.