Peter and Alissa Cohen survived a trial by fire and then some.
Fun fact: On Alissa and Peter Cohen’s first date, they both took their own cameras to capture the event. They’ve always been shutterbugs, just in their own unique ways. Peter was the technical one who understood the minutiae of how to take a proper picture, and Alissa just loved to have fun capturing the memories that life threw her way. Between the two of them, their passion for photography was immeasurable. But it would take almost 20 years after that first date for either of them to consider a career behind the lens.
And the way they got there wasn’t a lot of fun.
In 2002, Alissa, now the mother of two children with Peter, found herself frequenting various social events, always with her camera in tow. For years it had been this way — some of their friends would later comment that Alissa had more pictures of everyone else’s kids than the child’s own parents. But ’02 brought a change. She was going to b’nai mitzvah, and when she was done she would put the pictures on the web so the families could share them with everyone. “I thought that [shooting for free] was the nicest gift I could give people,” Alissa says.
She did that for years, essentially donating her services, and it became such a routine practice that people expected her to take pictures. Often the results out of Alissa’s lens were better than those from the professional photographer on-site. It became a thing, and she enjoyed it. In that first year of her taking photos, Alissa and Peter’s oldest son was 13, so the family went to a lot of events. “There were 15 that year,” Alissa says. That’s a lot of work.
A few years later, Peter found himself in the catbird seat. For years, he had done PR and marketing for various companies, and finally it was going to pay off. “In 2005, I got what I thought was going to be the last job of my life,” Peter explains. “Myself and a couple of colleagues had a small marketing agency and it was bought by one of our clients. I’m now a shareholder of this small company, but it was a decent size. Making pretty good money at the time — sort of for the first time.”
Let’s not gloss over that last statement. Things were never horrible for the Cohens. They had invested in tech stock before the bubble burst in the early ’00s, and yes, Peter had rotated from job to job quite a bit in the years since they had moved to Phoenix. But it wasn’t that bad. They always had a way to make money, because Peter could always freelance on his own for a bit if necessary. Now he was even a part owner of an agency that he loved. Things were looking up.
So let’s recap: Alissa is the “CEO of the house” as Peter describes it, while he was making some decent scratch doing what he loved. Unfortunately, things were about to go pear-shaped.
In March of 2009, Peter lost his job. There was no golden parachute, no fallback plan, he was just out of work and out of luck — the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and he lost even his initial investment. Alissa explains, “We were panicked, but not that panicked, because it had happened before.” No sweat. Peter starts freelancing out of the kitchen, and all was good with the world again. It was just a little speed bump in the road.
Then came the summer.
“In June I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which came out of nowhere,” Alissa says.
She never saw any warning signs; there weren’t any red flags that popped up telling her there was a problem. But one day, on a routine visit, a nodule on her thyroid was found, and subsequent visits determined it was cancer and surgery was scheduled. Alissa’s thyroid was removed, and no cancer was found in the surrounding area. It was a ray of light in this otherwise dismal time.
Shortly after the diagnosis, a financial disaster hit. It was the middle of summer in Scottsdale, and the Cohens’ air-conditioning unit went out. Although this could be a trivial thing for some people, Peter was still out of work, the medical bills were coming in, and Alissa wasn’t yet at 100 percent. And when the bill came for the new A/C unit and it was $15,000, well, that was just not the news they needed at the time.
Alissa recalls that period in their lives. “It was just one checkmark after the other. It felt like getting kicked in the stomach over and over again. We finally get to the point where depression had set in for me. All I could really think about was my own health issues at that point.” The downward spiral continued.
But then Peter, ever the optimist, reminded Alissa of the positives. “Then you had the fateful lunch,” he says, and Alissa nods her head in agreement.
Every so often, Alissa would meet up with eight or nine of her friends to have lunch, and in the middle of this whole debacle, one of those get-togethers was scheduled. She showed up, ate lunch and they did their thing. But then there was this awkward silence for a moment — something very strange was afoot, and Alissa could tell they wanted to talk to her about something.
“All of a sudden my friend Judy looks at me and goes, ‘OK. So here’s the deal: we’ve all been talking about this. My daughter’s bat mitzvah is coming up in three months, and I was looking at the pictures you took at [Judy’s oldest son’s bar] mitzvah, and they were better than my photographer. I want to hire you.’”
The Cohens were at a turning point in their lives. With nothing on the job front for Peter or Alissa, things were looking bleak. But then this had come out of left field for Alissa. Of course she had always considered the possibility of turning photography into a career, but making a real go at it? She wasn’t sure if she could do it.
Alissa says her friend laid it all out on the table. “She said, ‘We want you to shoot the pictures for [Judy’s daughter’s] bat mitzvah, and it’s up to you. This is it. Your make-or-break moment. What are you going to do?’” As Alissa sat stunned, her friends took turns telling her of additional mitzvah opportunities. By the time lunch was over, she was booked for eight b’nai mitzvah.
Obviously this wasn’t an easy decision to make, but she came to Peter and said, “I’ll do it if we can do it together.” That’s how Life Moments Photography was born.
The gigs started stacking up, and it all came from word of mouth. They would work a bar or bat mitzvah for a friend, then that person would refer them to another, and so on. Today, they’re working for an entirely new group of people, and they never knew any of them prior to getting the job. They’ve expanded so much that they’ve established a reputation for themselves, and it’s a good one.
Their advantage is the way they operate. It’s both a friendly competition between the two of them to try to get “the” shot of the night, but they also help each other out when tragedy strikes and something goes awry, like a memory card fills up or a camera dies. More than that, they also work hard to get to know the people they’re working with. They want to learn who that family is, because the more they know, the better they can tailor their images. It’s about providing a personal service, not just becoming another guy with a camera. This is where they excel.
Today, things are going pretty well for the Cohens. Their business has gotten to the point where they’re booking fairly far in advance, and they have something going on all the time. The couple is always pushing their own boundaries, though, including using different mediums and trying special techniques to get the shots they want. The results are amazing.
Getting to where they are today wasn’t a lot of fun, and it took a long time for the duo to realize their dreams. But now that they’re here, the future looks bright. Things are looking up.
To see more of Peter and Alissa’s work, visit bestlifemoments.com.
