I never imagined I’d be doing this. Yet life has a way of nudging us toward the things that truly matter; the things that both scare us and call to us, regardless of how impossible they might seem.

My journey here began in law, working across wills, probate, and estates. It gave me a stark, unflinching view of life’s limits. We all leave something behind. We all leave an impression; of our love, our choices, our story. What stayed with me most wasn’t the paperwork, but the profound nature of our fleeting existence. 

Law taught me about endings. Fashion, where I ultimately arrived, became the language through which I learned to capture life in a physical, photographic medium. For more than half a decade, I’ve been running brand, marketing and creative at Carla Zampatti, a leading Australian womenswear designer, collaborating with photographers, stylists, and artists every-day. In that world, I witnessed the extraordinary power of photography—how it can capture beauty, memory, identity, and legacy all at once. A photograph can move us in ways nothing else can.

The idea behind L’EMPREINTE comes from this understanding. I have a photograph of my parents, a single frame that I hold as my most treasured possession—I was immensely lucky to have one of my dear photographer friends capture it in early 2025. Seeing it for the first time was a reminder that our portraits are not just portraits; they are proof that we existed, that we were loved, that our presence mattered. That is the gift I want every family to have: a reminder that love endures, even when life does not.

My hope is that if we can preserve the essence of a life, even for a moment, we have done more than record history. We have held the world still, even briefly, and in that stillness, we have kept what is most precious alive.

Through a community of incredibly talented and generous creatives, donors and sponsors, the Foundation is a vessel we can use to ensure that families facing unimaginable loss capture their story, their love, their legacy.

We aim to do this through family portraiture photoshoots but we also aim to engage the wider community in conversations about dignity, mental health in times of loss, and what it means to honour those who we love. Through this work, we strive to create an anthology of this meaning, a legacy of our imprint on time. We were here, and it meant something.

Please join us, however you can: a donation or sponsorship, a connection to someone who might benefit, or simply a follow on Instagram. Every kindness keeps a story breathing. Because memory is the only immortality we can give.

Bryony Kent, Founder