She doesn’t ask about the children, what happened in the past or what their futures might hold. She needs only now. A few frames to immortalize their fragile lives.

 

Room 511 is first on her list. Outside the closed door, a young woman is weeping. Sheri says softly, “So you signed up for some photos?”

 

When you meet Sheri, she seems like one of those perpetually perky artists who wears bottle cap earrings and cat-eye glasses, and sees rainbows in the oily sheens of puddles.

 

She’s 45 but looks a decade younger. A soft-spoken single mom who still gets along with her kids’ dad. She croons ’50s songs with her teenage son, twirls on the trampoline with her 8-year-old daughter and takes so many pictures of them, she has to pay them $2 each to not run away.

 

She seldom uses a flash and avoids fluorescent lights, preferring to chase sunbeams with her long lens. And she tries to avoid the shadows that inevitably seep in with her work. Not work. She calls it her calling.