Double Exposure

Dave and Pamela Healey weren’t expecting twins. In fact, they’d bought tiny singles of everything in 1985, when their doctor suddenly informed them--three weeks before the birth--that they would be seeing double. Dave, a documentary photographer whose work has appeared in Newsweek and Time, recalled that he was scheduled to go to Haiti on assignment, “and I knew this would put a damper on my trip.”

Since the day they were born, however, Megan and Danielle have been the favorite objects in the eye of their father’s camera.

The 50-year-old photographer has approached the documentation of his daughters’ growth with a zeal usually reserved for his professional projects. The images on this page show that it has developed far beyond that of the average parent with an Instamatic. When the girls were about 2, for example, he did a series of their body parts: baby eyes, ears, toes.

That was the period when the Healeys, like most new parents, “inspected our kids every day, to make sure no weird rashes or odd growths had sprouted overnight.”

The photographer, who lives on the Westside, said he quickly realized that this would be a long-term commitment. “On most projects, I have a time limit; this one is timeless. I don’t know where it will take me or when it will end.”

In an age of video cameras and glitzy color, he chose only black and white stills.

“It’s a piece of time, captured on paper,” he said. “I like the subtlety of the black and white tones, and the prints are more stable; they can potentially last 400 years, whereas even the best color material will fade. I try for prints that many generations will enjoy, just as I enjoy looking at photos of my ancestors, which have survived intact from the 1800s.”

Of course, Megan and Danielle can’t see beyond the moment. They only know it’s fun being “snapped,” whether they’re waiting with their noses pressed against the screen for Daddy to come home or running through a tunnel under the Santa Monica Freeway. (He used to take them there so they could yell their lungs out and then hear their echoes.)

At about age 4, while out for a walk, they saw a “fat” woman and their parents explained about pregnancy. When they got balloons later that day, the twins pretended that they too were “with child.” When they got chicken pox, their daddy photographed their spots.

Healey hopes his pictures will bring joy. But “it’s certainly giving them lots of fun now. They love when I take pictures and they see themselves in the results.”