Christmas minis in Dubai: fifteen minutes with a toddler

Every birthday since he could crawl

The boy who would not be photographed

Daniela was thirty-six, a pharmacist who had moved to Dubai from Bogotá eight years earlier and had been raising Leo on her own since he was a baby. They lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Jumeirah Village Circle with a balcony full of herbs, and Leo had opinions about most things. About cameras his opinion was settled.

Raise a phone in his direction and both hands went over his face. Try again and he turned his back, or folded himself into Daniela’s neck, or simply left the room. At his second birthday party there were twenty-two photographs of the cake and not one of Leo’s face. Her mother in Bogotá, who saw her only grandson twice a year, asked for photos every Sunday on the family call. Daniela sent videos of his feet.

Mid-October, nap time

Why she chose a Christmas mini

She read about sessions on her phone while Leo napped, half convinced she was about to waste her money. What made her book was the arithmetic. The Christmas Mini was fifteen minutes, for children only, in a room called Christmas Morning that had been designed for little ones, with one outfit and nothing to change into. A longer family session would have meant longer for things to go wrong, and she didn’t need to be in the pictures. She had plenty of herself. What she didn’t have was her son’s face.

Our guide to Christmas mini photoshoots in Dubai covers how to choose between sessions. For Daniela it came down to a single question: what was the shortest, gentlest way to get one good photograph of a child who did not want one taken? She booked a weekday morning, an hour after breakfast and well before his nap.

The week before

Preparing a toddler for the camera without mentioning it

Daniela did not tell Leo he was going to have his photograph taken. She told him they were going to visit a Christmas room with twinkly trees, which was true. During the week she let him take pictures on her phone, of the cat next door, of his own toes, of her, and they looked at them together afterwards. She showed him old photographs of himself as a baby, from before the rule, and he was delighted to meet himself.

She chose his outfit by what he would tolerate rather than what she would have liked. The cream knitted jumper had a lovely collar but scratched, and he would have spent fifteen minutes pulling at it. The soft green one he had already worn twice went into the bag, with brown cord trousers and a pair of socks. No new shoes: shoes come off anyway, and new ones meant a fight. Into her bag she put his small grey rabbit, a box of raisins and nothing sticky.

9.52am, the lift

Arriving, and the door

The morning was going well, which made Daniela nervous. Leo pressed every button he was allowed to press in the lift, sang to himself in the corridor, and walked in holding the rabbit by one ear.

Then he saw the camera. It was not even pointing at him. It was on a strap around the photographer’s shoulder, and that was enough. His face crumpled, both arms went up, and Daniela picked him up while he buried himself in her neck. Over his head she began to apologise, the way parents do, and the photographer said something she remembered for weeks afterwards: that there was no rush, that this happens more often than anyone thinks, and that she should sit down with him wherever he felt comfortable.

Minutes one to seven

Seven minutes of crying

They sat on the floor of Christmas Morning, among the frosted trees and the twinkling lights, and Leo cried. Not a dramatic wail, which would have been easier, but the low, determined sob of a child making a point. Daniela glanced at her phone and did the sums. A fifteen-minute session, and seven of them gone.

What surprised her was what the photographer did with those seven minutes, which was very little. The camera went down on the floor. The photographer sat a little way off, not looking at Leo, and talked softly to Daniela about the decorations on the nearest tree, one at a time, as if there were all the time in the world. Nobody said “smile”. Nobody said “look at the camera”. Daniela was told, quietly, that she didn’t need to stop him crying; she only needed to be there.

Minute eight

The lights

It was the lights that did it. Somewhere in the eighth minute Leo lifted his head from Daniela’s shoulder to wipe his nose on her sleeve, and saw the string of tiny lights wound through the nearest tree. He stopped mid-sob. He looked at them for a long time, then at his mother, then back at the lights, as if checking that she could see them too.

Then he climbed off her lap. He walked to the tree, very slowly, and put one finger against a light to see if it was hot. It wasn’t. He looked over his shoulder at Daniela with an expression she knew well, the one that means “did you see that”, and somewhere off to the side a shutter clicked so quietly that neither of them noticed.

Minutes nine to fifteen

Peekaboo, and the hands came down

Here is the trick Daniela had never thought of, though it seems obvious now. The photographer noticed that Leo hid behind his hands, and made hiding the game. Hands went over the photographer’s eyes. “Where’s Leo?” Hands came away. Leo, who had invented this game himself and had never had anyone play it back to him properly, was outraged and then delighted. He hid. He peeked. He laughed, the full-body, head-thrown-back laugh that Daniela had never once managed to catch on her phone.

The last six minutes went past in what felt like one. He showed the photographer his rabbit. He sat under the tree and offered his rabbit a raisin. He came back to Daniela and leaned against her knee, looking at the lights, his hands for once at his sides. At fifteen minutes he was the one who didn’t want to leave.

Five days later

The photograph that came after

The preview gallery arrived within five days. Daniela opened it on the sofa after Leo was asleep, braced for a set of photographs of the back of his head. There were none of the crying. Not because anything had been hidden, but because the camera had stayed on the floor until the crying was over.

Looking back, Daniela said she had spent the week preparing for the wrong problem. She had worried about the crying and tried everything to prevent it. What mattered in the end was not whether Leo cried but what everyone did while he was crying: nobody rushed him, nobody pointed a camera at him, and nobody made her feel she had to apologise for her son. The crying ran its course. His curiosity was always going to arrive; it only needed room.

What there was instead was Leo, looking at the lights. Leo with one finger on a bulb. Leo, mid-peekaboo, one eye showing between his fingers, about to laugh. That was the one she chose first and the one she printed for Bogotá. Her mother called the day it arrived, and for once the Sunday call was not about videos of feet. The rule about cameras still stands, more or less. But there is now one photograph in the world in which Leo was, quite obviously, having a wonderful time.