All throughout my photography class, I've needed to hands-on work to complete assignments. I would need to go out and take unique pictures for the photo challenge every week. What made this so difficult, though, were my sisters. They were eager to divert all the attention to themselves, not what kind of pictures I wanted to take. Constantly annoying me, getting in my way, ruining my photographs- they made photography ten times harder, especially when I was alone to look after them. After a bunch of photo-shoots with silly poses and goofy smiles, they would let me go to do my work. This would happen every week, but they never got tired of it.

I had a really hard time figuring out what I wanted to do for my final project. I had lots of crazy themes in mind that would, in reality, never work out with the time limit that I had. So I started asking my sisters for ideas, and they, of course, asked to include them in my project. I just gave up, compiled, and made this photo series. Just for them.

My name is Via Shamlian. I go HeLa high school, procrastinate my homework, prefer pineapple on my pizza, and like to sleep in on the weekends- nothing out of the ordinary. Besides my mom and dad, I live with my three little sisters. Sandra, who's ten, Amelia, who's three, and Sofia, who's only eleven months old. Those guys are really the only family I have here- the rest of the squad is back in Ternopil, Ukraine, where I lived for the first four years of my life. My mom was having trouble finding a job, so my family and I moved to Fallon, Nevada in the United States. Eventually, we moved again, this time to Vancouver, Washington, where I'm still living in today.

I started drawing from the day I learned how to hold a pen, and I've been butchering art since then. Of course, I wasn't butchering art professionally back then; It took me a while to realize that I actually liked art, which led to an interest to learning how to do art- as in, the different techniques you use in various art forms. So I started drawing, painting, figure skating, dancing, making pottery, making jewelry- all that good stuff. Around the autumn of eighth grade, I was introduced to a new art form- photography. Intrigued, I took a photography class for the second semester of my freshman year. That’s how I was introduced to this class.