Ruthanne Pryor Photography

Origin story

I spent eleven years as a newspaper photographer and was laid off with the rest of the picture desk in 2016. A friend asked me to photograph her father's memorial that autumn because she knew I would not make anyone pose, and other families kept asking after that.

Why families choose us

I photograph the day the way a documentary photographer would: no posing, no direction, no flash, and no asking anyone to do something again. What you get is your uncle laughing in a doorway and your mother's hands on the rail, rather than a row of people looking at a camera. There is one exception I always offer. Families are almost never all in one place except on this day, and a great many of them tell me later that they wish somebody had taken the group picture. So I ask once, usually before the meal, and if you say no I never raise it again. I work alone, I stay four to six hours, and you get every usable frame — four hundred or so, edited, in about ten days.

Ownership