Los Angeles photographer Nick Haymes has spent 25 years photographing his two sons, Philipp and Lawrence, and the result is Chronograph, a new photobook published by Mack. It's Nice That spoke with Haymes and his sons about a book that records parenthood and childhood — time made visible through light and image. The book opens with a jarring image: the destruction of the Twin Towers, which fell 25 years ago this year. As the viewer moves through the collection — drooling baby faces, bright eyes, porcelain skin turning into teenage acne and whispery facial hair — the logic of the opening becomes clear: as two monoliths of Western iconography fell in New York City, elsewhere two boys began growing up. The narrative is equally macro and micro, bookended by death, both collective and personal. Haymes is known as a grungy, intimate photographer in the Larry Clark vein — his earlier collection The Last Survivor shares that scruffy register — but Chronograph makes some of his strongest statements on youth, pain, and loss. Chronograph means the recording of time in Greek, and Haymes uses the long arc to record happiness and sadness, the fleetingness of it all, growing from literal ashes into something commonplace yet remarkable. The project was a quarter century in the making, with his publisher Bruno Ceschel reportedly waiting some 15 years for the story to complete itself. The interview touches on permission — photographing one's own children over decades is its own negotiation — and on photographs as a way of holding on to the living.