Ditte Harlov Johnsen

A more gentle take on mothers and children from
Ditte Haarlov Johnsen (via Conscientious) - look at the accompanying letters the young mothers wrote.

annet van der voort

Annet van der Voort looks at young mothers with their new borns in a direct way that captures something of the physical and emotional trauma of becoming a mother. There's a real sense of fatigue in there and I like the feeling of the frailty of mother and child.

Lise Sarfati

In her images of Sloane and her mother, Lise Sarfati looks at the relationship between mother and child through their shared love of dramatic dress - a kind of motherand child 'partnerlook' as the Germans so precisely put it. Here is a piece I did for the lovely Gomma Magazine (next edition in Autumn 2008 or thereabouts, possibly).






Four years ago, Lise Sarfati was travelling across America to photograph teenagers for her New Life series. One of Sarfati’s most successful New Life subjects was Sloane, a chameleon-like teenager from Berkeley, California. Inspired by her New Life series, Sarfati returned to the United States to focus on the relationship between Sloane and her mother.

One image from the series (titled Mother and Daughter ) shows Sloane outside a suburban house. She looks down, away from the camera, her heavily made-up face further disguised by the veil of hair that surrounds her. Sloane is the daughter, but what kind of daughter is she - her face is a mask that expresses no emotion and reveals nothing except a slightly eerie suburbanised beauty. The effect is compounded by other images - Sloane in big glasses in a frilly necked red dress, Sloane by a book shelf, her face a picture of disinterest and boredom, and Sloane in her bedroom wearing the kind of dress that Loretta Lux’s otherworldly children would die for. Sloane almost struggles under the weight of wigs, cosmetics and costumes she wears.

Continue reading here



images copyright - Lise Sarfati

Mother and Child

Happy New Year - here's to a great 2008.

A few blasts from the past to start the New Year.

One of the difficulties Jill Greenberg mentioned in her BJP interview was that of being a photographer and mother - a problem experienced (far more deeply and disturbingly I suspect) by Sally Mann who really made photography of children critically acceptable. Mann's a modern pioneer in showing how children lived, breathed and felt the world around them - but she did get lambasted for her troubles.

In Pictures of Innocence, Anne Higonnet writes, "What really shocked people was that Mann was the mother of the children she photographed." Mann's "...representations of maternity are suffused with desire, not desire in any single sexual sense, but in a much broader sense, including the need to flaunt the physical beauty of children who are flesh of their flesh, and the ambition to cast themselves simultaneously as mothers, as disturbingly creative artists and as successful professionals."

It's the last bit that some people find difficult according to Higonnet - a mother who has "...an artistic impulse on the subject of her own maternity, who lets it go beyond the narrow limits of ideal Romantic innocence, is bound to offend."

The people who are offended have, it seems, an implicit idea of an imaginary idealised motherhood and childhood which bears no relation to the physical and emotional realities of either state. Where those idealised childhoods/motherhoods come from is a question that Higonnet attempts to answer in her wonderful book - and one I will touch on throughout the coming months.



The Alligator's Approach - copyright Sally Mann

Next Year

Next Year? More on children, crying, great photography and the book of the year (or is that decade?) Paul Graham's A Shimmer of Possibility - also in the January 2nd, 2008 edition of the BJP.

Happy Christmas, Holidays and New Year.

Isabel crying

Issy Crying

More crying children

A Child Crying: Diane Arbus