About Melaina

I started taking photos in high school in the mid-aughts—think lots of questionable fashion choices related to low rise jeans, flip phones with badly downloaded custom ringtones, objectively not good photos shared to Facebook when it was still cool, and a whole lot of teenage angst.

Like most totally normal, well-adjusted teenage girls, I went full throttle into a fan-like obsession with photography, akin to my previous fascinations with Harry Potter and later One Direction (#noregrets). I started collecting photos and taking photos, curating them in countless photo boxes and marking coffee table photo books with sticky notes for further research and admiration. But unlike other subjects of infatuation, photography never faded away.

I love that a single photo has the power to show you how embarrassingly in love you were when you were 16, how cool your dad thought he was with a handlebar mustache in college, how truly weird you have always been with your sister, how desperately you love your friends, how infectious joy is in any photo from any era, how stoked two people can be for their future, and how perfectly imperfect the life you’ve created has turned out.

So let’s create more of those photos.
What better art than the visual stories of our lives?