This Photo Series is a Reminder That Our Homes Are Beautiful Living Scrapbooks

Louisiana-based photographer Hector Sanchez has spent decades capturing beautiful interiors for magazines, including Country Living, Southern Living, and Better Homes & Gardens. (You can see some of his work in this Mississippi house tour.) However, most recently, his focus has shifted toward capturing spaces for everyday people looking to preserve a visual memory of a place—think your childhood home or grandma’s collected kitchen and packed-tight pantry. These spaces may not necessarily be the images you’d see in your typical magazine, and that’s precisely the point.

It all started when Hector’s girlfriend, Sara McDaniel of Simply Southern Cottage, was lamenting the fact that she didn’t have any photos of her late grandmother’s home, and wished she had documented it “as is”— no professional styling, no attempts at perfection, just a sentimental snapshot of a fleeting moment of time. That observation led to Hector’s latest artistic endeavor: Offering professional interiors photography to people looking to memorialize the perfect imperfection of the spaces that mean the most to them.

Titled “Portraits of Places,” the series aims to document the raw, real, lived-in nature of our homes, and the elements that we’ll want to remember years from now—a visual time capsule of sorts. Recent client Henders Haggerty is just one of those sentimental souls. When his grandmother Dot had to move our of her Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, home after a medical emergency forced her to transition into assisted living, Hector helped him capture the place the exact way she left it.

The exterior of Grandma Dot’s home, captured before she moved into an assisted living facility

Grandma Dot’s kitchen window as captured as part of Hector Sanchez’s "Portraits of Places" series

Grandma Dot’s kitchen featuring the everyday accents of life

Sunflower cafe curtains and a cookie jar add layers of character to a cozy wood-clad kitchen

“From the paperwork on her desk, to family portraits hanging above her bed, to crocheted doilies lying about, these memories are priceless and frozen in time for Dot’s family to reflect on for eternity,” says Sara, who recently shared the photos on Instagram. Henders says it was important to commemorate his grandmother Dot’s house for his two young children. “They will now be able to visualize the love and warmth I experienced when I visited my grandmother’s home.”

Grandma Dot’s card table with an almost-completed puzzle

A wooden dresser topped with family photos

And while not everyone can enjoy the luxury of commissioning original photography, Hector’s work is a lovely and important reminder that we can all do a better job of embracing and documenting the everyday beauty to be found in our surroundings. Years from now, it’s likely a child’s messy unmade bed or a granddad’s cluttered desk will be far more beautiful to you than you can ever realize in the moment.

Grandma Dot’s bedroom

Grandma Dot’s closet, a reminder that even our more cluttered spaces are beautiful when you look at them through a new lens

“There will be no more ‘I wish I had a picture of my grandmother’s house the way it was,’” says Hector. “The images will memorialize the special place forever.”