Portals

Some hallways are just hallways.

This one never was.

I made this photograph of my father, Kedrick Hoek, and my stepmother, Carolina Hoek, at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Rice Village in Houston, Texas, sometime around 1986 or 1987. I was early in my photographic life. Still in high school. Still learning what a camera could do, and what it could hold.

This was long before digital.

It was a metal camera body. Film.I rolled the film myself. Negatives I processed myself. A print I made with my own hands.

And I am almost certain I made them walk that corridor more than once.

Hand in hand.

Real smiles. Real love. Real patience.

At the time, my father was an architect. My stepmother was a museum director. They were both happy for me. Happy that I had found the thing I loved. Happy to step into my little experiment and let me try to make something real.

My father poured himself into my photographic life.

He believed in me early. He supported me fully. He loved me without hesitation.

That matters even more to me now than it did then.

I am writing this from my father’s house in 2026. Forty years later.

He has stage 4 kidney disease, progressing into stage 5. He can barely get out of bed.

When I heard how bad things had gotten, I rescheduled all my shoots, rearranged my schedule, and left as quickly as I could. I came because there was nowhere else I was supposed to be.

And now I am here.

Trying to help.

Trying to understand what help even means.

That is a hard sentence to write.

They love each other deeply. They are strong. Independent. And there is something heartbreaking about watching people you love struggle while still being reluctant to accept help. You want to fix it. You want to carry more of it. You want to have answers ready in your hands.

I do not have those answers.

Right now, being here is the most that I can do.

And some moments, that feels unbearably helpless.

Today I took the framed picture off the wall in my father’s office and photographed it with my iPhone on his desk. That is the image you are seeing here.

Nothing has been done to it.

I did not retouch it. I did not clean it up. I did not try to turn it into something more polished than it is.

It is a photograph of a photograph.

And somehow that feels right.

Because this is not about polish.

It is about proof.

Proof that they were there in that corridor in Houston, hand in hand. Proof that I saw them that way. Proof that even at the beginning, before I knew much, I already knew I was looking for something more than a face.

I was looking for a portal.

That word has followed me for a long time.

I stop in my tracks when I see one.

A corridor. An archway. A threshold. A passage of light with shape around it. I see those spaces and immediately imagine a person inside them. Not because the architecture is beautiful on its own, though it often is. But because certain spaces do something rare. They hold presence. They create gravity. They make you feel that stepping through is not just movement.

It is meaning.

That is what I have been trying to make ever since this photograph.

Not just portraits.

Portals.

Pictures that do more than describe what someone looked like on a given day. Pictures that open a door. Pictures that let you walk back into a feeling. Back into a season. Back into a version of love that still exists, even when the body has changed, even when time has become cruel, even when the next chapter is standing at the door.

This next chapter is going to be so hard.

So hard.

And maybe that is part of why this image stopped me.

I wish I could take them back to Houston. Back to Christ the King Lutheran Church. Back to that exact corridor. I wish I could place them in that same frame again and watch them walk toward me one more time.

I wish I had the answers.

I wish I knew how to support them better.

I wish love automatically came with instructions for moments like this.

It does not.

Sometimes love looks like action.

Sometimes it looks like knowing exactly what to do.

And sometimes it looks like showing up, sitting down, and admitting that your presence is the only thing you have to give.

This photograph reminds me where so much of my life began.

It began with trust.

It began with two people who gave a young photographer their time, their patience, and their joy.

It began with my father, who supported me long before there was any professional version of this life. Long before there was a body of work. Long before I knew what I was doing. He believed in me anyway.

And maybe that is part of what crushes me now.

You spend your life moving forward. Building. Working. Solving. Showing up. You think there will be more time to say things clearly. More time to return the love in equal measure. More time to understand what someone really gave you while they were giving it.

Then one day you are standing in your father’s house, looking at a photograph that has been there all along, and you realize it has been waiting for you.

Waiting for you to be old enough to understand it.

The strongest photographs do that.

They do not reveal everything at once.

They wait.

They deepen.

They tell the truth a little more each year.

This image of my parents is one of those photographs for me. It is an early portrait. A family portrait. An architectural moment. A record of love. A record of faith in me before I had done anything to earn that kind of faith.

And now it is something else.

Now it is a portal.

Not into nostalgia.

Not into some sweeter, easier version of the past.

Into the unbearable distance between then and now.

Into the memory of their strength.

Into the reality of what time does.

I wish I could take them back to that corridor in Houston and photograph them again.

I can’t.

I wish I had answers.

I don’t.

I wish I knew how to help in the way I want to help.

I don’t know that either.

This next chapter is going to be so hard.

So hard.

And there is no good ending for that sentence tonight.

There is only this photograph.

There is only love.

There is only the fact that I am here, supporting any and every way I can.