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EDGE of Mothering

I want to borrow an idea from a great lesson on the theme of “Edge” put together by Photopedagogy.  The below text is a direct copy and paste from this lesson plan. The link to the original post in the bottom.

Create a set of photographs that attempt to capture the feeling of being on the edge of something. This work might relate to a looming experience, a hope or fear, a pending decision or a significant change.

Alternatively, your responses might stem from adventurous explorations - views from the familiar to the strange, the permitted to the forbidden, from the outside looking in (or vice versa). ?

How might you use photography to draw attention to ‘everyday’ edges - the seemingly mundane corners, borders and boundaries that tend to pass unnoticed? For example, consider table-tops, sinks, steps, gutters, doorways, fences, road-markings etc. How might you use your camera to collect, categorise and order, or alternatively, to abstract, flatten and distort?

Some useful words: Boundary, threshold, periphery, verge; anticipation, apprehension, tension; contrast, juxtaposition, conflicting

You might be interested in:

Dafna Talmor, Obstructed Views, 2018

https://www.photopedagogy.com/uploads/5/0/0/9/50097419/version_3__a_new_europe__edges_.pdf

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TRANSFORMATION through mothering  PART 2 Answers 

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TRANSFORMATION through mothering  PART 2 Answers 

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In our last session we shared with each other our reflection on these questions.

Each person on his or her journey, challenges and struggles are unique.

We have been learning and are still learning

To overcome / accept / live with

Imperfections, discomfort in specific social settings, need to please others

We face fears

We are stretched on all sides

Mothering is deconstruction

Learning to free ourselves

So only then we can free everyone around us

To show mercy to ourselves

To take time to grieve big and small deaths

-       Including death of our youthful dreams

To be okay to be not okay

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TRANSFORMATION through mothering  PART 1 Question

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TRANSFORMATION through mothering  PART 1 Question

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Mothering is nurturing and supporting others to grow and growing ourselves through the process of meeting the challenges that come with it.

Mothering surely allows us to meet our edges.

Or shall we say it pushes us off our edges?

What is your edge right now in your life?

What is calling you, what is challenging, what is opening?

How is mothering stretching me and helping me to grow as a human being?

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about being on the edge / in-between space

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Our own Satu took part in this project as a model.  What a diverse activities mothers are doing.

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The event of motherhood changes the physical form and self-perception of the body, and for some, challenges the external perceptions of beauty values. Emotional response can vary, of course: grief, pride, gratitude, self-loathing/loving.
-young

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To my husband for the small things I don’t say thank you for ...

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Reflection on the Assignment of May 17: Pressing the shutter button when we are feeling low... in the middle of "it"  

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Reflection on the Assignment of May 17: Pressing the shutter button when we are feeling low... in the middle of "it"  

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Those of us who tried it realised that it was very difficult to actually do this. In theory, the act of taking a photo when someone is having a fit of anger, frustration, or feeling overwhelmed should help the person to gain a perspective, right? As many other things in life, it is easier said than done.

So as an alternative, some of us will try to find a metaphor for the song emotion we go through in our daily lives, and make a photo of/about these metaphors.

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Making a Love Poem with a Camera

As a mother, daughter, or a partner, I have a privilege of having an insider’s view into someone’s life. I get to observe a lot about the the people I live with: how they unwind after a long day; what they like to eat; what they enjoy doing when they are alone; what they can’t care less about; what annoys them… the list goes on.

For the next few days, set your intention to pay more attention to the person you love using the camera as a tool.

Step 1.

Explain to the person that you are taking snapshots of his or her moments as an effort to love him or her more. Tell him or her that you will get their permission if you ever share the photo.

Step 2.

Take five or more pictures of the person per day for three days.

Capture a moment of your person when he or she is alone, doing the daily routine, or engaging with you.

Step 3.

After three days of shooting, look at the photos you have taken and see if you have discovered something new about the person or something you didn’t know about your relationship to the person.

Step 4.

Choose a picture that you want to post on our community board and ask for the permission from your person. If the person doesn’t agree, think about writing down what the photo was about.

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As a group, we identified some of the elements that what we consider good photographs share based on our own observations.

- Lighting!
- A picture with a story
- Makes eye move around the picture
- Has a movement
- Contains a question
- Has a feeling/emotion

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In this podcast, we hear Pádraig Ó Tuama's reflection on a poem "Mountain Dew Commercial disguised as a Love Poem" by Matthew Olzmann.

A simple idea that paying attention to and noticing idiosyncrasies of someone I live with can be an act of love resonates with me.

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Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama. And when I was a teenager, late one evening I saw my father come into the kitchen, grab a slice of bread, and eat it. I think his blood sugar had dropped. And there was so much about that moment that struck me. I was a teenager with angst about myself and everybody around me, and noticing a moment of vulnerability in somebody else struck me. And I think that was telling me I needed to be a poet, because I had to do something with what I'd seen. And over and over again, the more I've written poetry and read poetry, the more I realize that moments, simple, observed moments, are calling out to be written about.

[ music: "Praise the Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

"Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem" by Matthew Olzmann:

"So here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated and kind of stupid.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you're mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Kahlo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn't put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty-not even leftovers or condiments-
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it."

[ music: "Outstretched Hand" by Gautam Srikishan]

I chose this poem because of its humor and because of its clever use of deflection and privacy, of its attention to love in all the small idiosyncrasies and privacies of the person, and also because I love list poems, and this is a very definite kind of list poem. The word "because" occurs 12 times in it. And so in a certain sense, this is a list of "becauses," and I think it's a lovely gathering of all these reasons why this poet, Matthew Olzmann, is in love with his wife, Vievee Francis, the woman he's married to.

He's paying attention to so many interesting things. He notices that she wears pink. And we hear that she writes and reads, and reads critically. He's looking at what skills she has, what she can do with her hands. We're hearing about her humor and memory and habits, and then silly stories about writing the contents of a moving box inside it. But that time they moved, where were they moving from and where to? There's a sense of history happening here. And there's opinions that she has, and her generosity, her attention to sharing what she reads with him, and her way of coping with being angry or frustrated. And then there's ways of even acting on what she's reading, like seeing a recipe in a book about Frida Kahlo and thinking, "I'm gonna cook that recipe"; and then her critical attention to books; and then that really interesting part about privacy - having the curtains closed and a sheet nailed over the top of it. He's noticing what it is that she's uncomfortable with.

And what we see over and over again is how his attention is turned toward somebody in a way where that attention is received with love. I think in many ways this poem has a tension held between it between noticing and courtesy, between observing somebody but also knowing that, even when they're observed, they are still a private person; and within that kind of understanding of two individual people who continue to be two individual people, even when they're married, that that dignity and respect for their individuality is the very thing that means their observation of each other is an observation of love.

[ music: "Simple Vale" by Blue Dot Sessions]

In this poem, the woman being described, Vievee Francis - and we've already heard the poem from Vievee Francis which she has written and dedicated to Matthew - is extraordinarily observant but, nonetheless, doesn't necessarily want to be seen from the outside unless she's choosing it. And the poet, too, is observant. The poet is writing in a certain way where he's kind of deflecting the fact that it's a love poem by saying it's a Mountain Dew commercial, which of course it's not, it's a love poem. And the "you" in the poem, even when she's writing, she's writing on the inside of boxes. And so there's a certain recognition of what your own private conversation with yourself is, the things you keep quiet in yourself.

And I think that can sometimes be the kind of love that can take a long time to get to. In the first flushes of love, you can sometimes want to change somebody to be somehow doing the things that you understand and definitely don't annoy you. And this kind of love seems to have matured into the sense of where people are just observing each other in the idiosyncrasies of their life and in the way that things like that are funny; but also, they're not trying to change each other.

[ music: "Tiny Water Glass" by Blue Dot Sessions]

One of the things about this poem is, on a formal level it uses this thing called objectification. And that, when you're writing poetry, isn't the way that we use it to describe derogatory behavior. This poem objectifies - as in it makes an object of - it objectifies love in the form of a bottle of Mountain Dew. And I suppose one of the invitations of this poem is to think, what object would you use to tell the story of your relationship with somebody you love? It might be a train ticket or a cinema ticket, or it might be a tattoo. It might be all kinds of things where you'd go, "This object, this thing sums up a story of love between me and another person" - a friend, a sibling, a partner.

And I think one of the brilliant pieces of technicality in this poem is that this poem is focusing our attention on the bottle of Mountain Dew, and it's even calling the poem a commercial for Mountain Dew, but yet we know absolutely, throughout it, that this isn't about a bottle of Mountain Dew, that this is all about what that means and what's behind it. It's all about the fact that the fridge was empty. There could've been so many things to spend the "last damn dime" on except that one thing, which was based on listening and the one time that he said he liked this drink, and she purchasing it for him.

[ music: "Careless Morning" by Blue Dot Sessions]

This poem makes brilliant use of alternative lengths of line. Listen to this: "Because you memorize songs, even commercials / from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming. / You have soft hands." Boom. I think the alternated way within which there's elongated lines that stretch out over line breaks, and then a four-word line, "You have soft hands" - it means that this poem is constantly shifting. You can't read this as a da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, / da-dum, da-dum, da-dum poem. It doesn't have a metric beat. And I think within the context of that, what this shows us is that the person who's being observed in this poem is many things.

And that's one of the ways that a form of a poem has to have a much bigger purpose. And the much bigger purpose of using long lines and short lines, and ways that the lines even repeat - "you drove me to the train station. You drove me / to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence" - these repeated lines, other short lines, and then these really long lines, they're all showing us that the object of the poem, the person who's really being described, is many things at once; that she can't be narrowed down to just one thing. She's not just a poet. She's not just a partner. She's not just a reader. She's not just a critic. She's many things, all at once.

[ music: "Into the Earth" by Gautam Srikishan]

Years ago, I remember reading E. M. Forster's book Where Angels Fear to Tread, and there's this throwaway line in the middle of it, a beautiful throwaway line, and it's pretty much the only thing I can remember from the book. And the line is: "For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone."

And I remember reading that book years and years ago and being so struck by the quality of looking at somebody who you love, and what it's like to see somebody who you love, in a moment where they might not know that you're looking at them, and that even if they do notice you noticing them, that they know that you're looking at them with love. So there's no sense of being cornered or being observed in something that you don't want to be observed in, but something really beautiful in watching somebody who you love.

So I think this poem has a certain calling-out to people who are engaging with it. It is a poem that is entirely engaged with the small universe between two people who love each other. And as a result, I think the invitation of this poem is for the readers or the listeners to the poem to do something similar - to notice those we love, and to notice being noticed, as well, and to share love in that noticing. And this poem knows that love is shown in this kind of attention to each other - not to pigeonhole them or their contradictions or to judge them, but simply to notice what's important to them. And in honoring what's important to them, we might honor that part of them that we might never know fully, but that nonetheless will always be present to us, right in front of us.

[ music: "Outstretched Hand" by Gautam Srikishan]

"Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem":

"So here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated and kind of stupid.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you're mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Kahlo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn't put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty-not even leftovers or condiments-
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it."

[ music: "Praise the Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

Lily Percy: "Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem" comes from Matthew Olzmann's book Mezzanines. Thank you to The Permissions Company on behalf of Alice James Books, who gave us permission to use Matthew's poem. Read it on our website, at onbeing.org.

[ music: "Praise the Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

Poetry Unbound is: Gautam Srikishan, Chris Heagle, Erin Colasacco, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, and me, Lily Percy.
Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. This podcast is produced by On Being Studios, which is located on Dakota land.

We also produce other podcasts you might enjoy, like On Being with Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise, and This Movie Changed Me. Find those wherever you like to listen, or visit us at onbeing.org to find out more.

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Matthew Olzmann - Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem | The On Being Project

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Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama. And when I was a teenager, late one evening I saw my father come into the kitchen, grab a slice of bread, and eat it. I think his blood sugar had dropped. And there was so much about that moment that struck me.

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Jone's photos of her husband Joel feels like a visual love poem.

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After having been married for 32 years my husband passed away in 2008, after a long illness. Once widowed, I experienced the confusing and mixed feelings of grief: guilt, loneliness, regrets, indelible memories of loving glances, hugs, and laughs. In 2009 I decided to try online dating because I wanted to meet a man for an occasional movie or dinner date.

The second man I met online was Joel, and we felt a bond right away. Soon after, I closed my account on JDate. We married in January of 2012 in a lovely ceremony at home. I hadn't expected to fall in love, but I did. To my surprise and delight, I found that I could deeply love this wonderful man who entered my life, while holding dear the memories of my first husband.

Having been in a long-term marriage, I came to this new relationship with the tools in place to be a good wife. We quickly fell into the routine and ease of being a stable married couple, except that we were newlyweds in our 60's. There is humor in that. For one thing, our bodies are not supple and streamlined the way they were when we were young. We both come with a lot of baggage, and at our ages, it's no big deal, nothing to get excited about. We've both seen a lot, done a lot, and have higher thresholds for idiosyncratic behavior than in our 20's and 30's.

In this series, Second Time Around, I delight in observing my new husband as he goes about living day to day. We both know that life is short, and perhaps because of our new found love and comfort, can journey through this life with a certain enthusiasm. We feel secure, yet we know we're lucky.

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Second Time Around - Susan Rosenberg Jones

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After having been married for 32 years my husband passed away in 2008, after a long illness. Once widowed, I experienced the confusing and mixed feelings of grief: guilt, loneliness, regrets, indelible memories of loving glances, hugs, and laughs. In 2009 I decided to try online dating because I wanted to meet a man for an occasional movie or dinner date.

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I’ve realized that many of the ‘meltdowns’ that occur in our home are as a result of too much time in front of one screen or another. It perpetuates the cycle of fatigue and completely saps creativity. Here was a moment where we realized the device needed to be put down in favour of a healthier, more engaging activity. The entire tone of the weekend changed with this action.

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Saturday morning, my family was hit by a big emotional hurricane. Between the first and second wave there was a moment of calmness. My daughter was drawing this.

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Antidotes to perfect motherhood in social media: Expressing a full range of emotions involved in mothering 

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Antidotes to perfect motherhood in social media: Expressing a full range of emotions involved in mothering 

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How would we capture the moments of  the hard things of mothering

For example,

Dealing with ungratefulness in our children

Coaching our children’s emotion or failing to do so

Being pushed off my edge

When mommy messes up

regret… Shame… guilt… anxiety… Jealousy, a sense of inadequacy…..

List goes on...

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"Internal Dialogue" is a juried photography show on the One Twelve Site. The selected works were the responses to the question "How does forced social distancing manifest in our internal dialogue?" Examine how each artists is addressing his or her emotion through photography. One of the selected artist is Dawn Yow whose shares ups and downs of daily mothering life through Instagram.

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Internal Dialogue Online Showcase - One Twelve

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Michael is also an independent curator and juror, and advocate for the photographic arts. He has been a juror for Photolucida's Critical Mass, and has reviewed portfolios for the Los Angeles Center of Photography's Exposure Reviews and CENTER's Review Santa Fe. Michael has been a contributing writer for Lenscratch, Light Leaked, and Don't Take Pictures magazine.

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Anna Casa Broda's writing that accompanies her photographs with her children reveals how she is processing the things from your own childhood along side her own growing children.  We all have our stuff... Some big emotions visit us through the cracks opened up by daily interactions with your children...

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Mothering is relational work. I would add that it is INTENSE emotional work.

So it work brings out in us all ranges of emotions.  Joy, sadness, anger, fear, regret, peacefulness, jealousy, bliss, gratitude, simple contentment, guilt, and shame, you name it, we experience all, something in just 24 hours.

This weeks assignment is to press the shutter button when you are feeling rather bad for whatever reason.

Notice what what/who is around you and what you are doing. Take pictures of these things that you mentally note.

Then simply note down on a piece of paper (or on your phone)  the date, time, and what you are feeling.

On another day (preferably a few days later)  go back to those pictures and write down everything you see in the picture and what you understand about what you were feeling at that moment. See if you discover something new about your emotions from the pictures.

Feel free to post some of your pictures from this assignment to "Our Works" wall.

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3rd picture (final). Cleaned up. Another angle taking picture sitting on floor instead of standing up.

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My 2nd picture

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My 1st picture.

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My 2nd picture.
I bought this large freezer when we moved to our new apartment seven years ago. I found a place for it in the remote corridor. It is mine. Whenever I go to Finland I buy my favourite foods that you can’t get from here (rue bread, carnelian pirogues, reindeer meet, chocolate etc) and I stock it here and then serve and teach my kids (and husband) about mine and their culture through food. In the second picture I changed the lighting so I can be seen as a reflection on the freezer. I also added the top of the freezer. Our picknick equipment (which does not relate to Finland).

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My 1st picture

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This is the second “styled” picture. I added the flower. A kids chair. Took an angle from more behind.

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Modern technology, imagination and our children 

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Modern technology, imagination and our children 

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My first picture is our living rooms “entertainment center”. I wanted to photograph it as at the moment it causes some uproar in the family. Kids only want to watch tv. We want them to read. So the tv is “covered”. The second picture I tried to style the pic a bit.

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Recently I am struck by the parental responsibility of creating a safe space for my children - the urge to show, clarify, explicitly share unconditional love.
-young

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Food.

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Monday morning my son going to school. All set.

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Make a photograph that speaks to you about this question in some way.

How does mothering make you question or transform (or not) your relationship to yourself?

*The image can be a single image or a series of a few images.

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"Here, as in much of Lawson’s portraiture, the interior domestic space is transformed into a stage, and addressed as a site through which distinct cultures intersect in a weave of black life that cannot be understood outside of its histories of flight and migration. "

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Lives are bound together in a collection of photographs. Two young girls, dressed identically, sit on a sofa: one looks directly at the camera, her painted lips pursed in a pout; the other, her sister perhaps, looks slightly down, as if caught in a daydream, her attention elsewhere. A woman dressed in a pink swimsuit smiles coyly at the viewer as she sits on her topless beau's lap, locked in an embrace against a backdrop of lush foliage, their neat high-tops, seemingly out of place within the natural environment, appear like a status symbol. A baby, just born and still covered in amniotic fluid, is wrapped in a towel as their exhausted mother gazes down, her partner's disembodied hand held protectively around her head. Another woman wearing a silk purple dressing gown, possibly a mother, styles the hair of her nude daughter who sits in a chair in their living room - in one corner stacks of CDs and DVDs, and on the other side of the room, display cabinets upon which stand a porcelain doll in Victorian dress, candles, and what appear to be a pair of graduation certificate folders proudly taking their place among framed family photographs.

Questions of Black agency, dignity and self-determination are addressed in the work of American artist and photographer Deana Lawson. Drawing from photographic genres such as studio photography, documentary, family photographs and the tableaux, Lawson's large-format colour work typically portrays members of her local community in Brooklyn, as well as strangers, in scenes that reflect on family, love, selfhood, beauty, pride and the Black aesthetic. It's part of an ongoing project to visualise a standard of values that, while
informed by certain stylistic qualities, are distinct from and challenge those that have been imposed by a Western art-history of portraiture that has historically excluded Black bodies.

Lawson's work operates within a canon of Black photographic portraiture that has been, prior to the twenty-first century, largely overlooked by art-historical academia, but which dates back almost to when photography first became a publicly accessible medium. In the United States the Goodridge Brothers set up one of the earliest Black photography studios in York, Pennsylvania, in 1847, which relocated to Saginaw, Michigan, and made daguerreotypes that reflected individuals and families in a dignified manner that opposed those taken for anti-Black propagandistic purposes; Frederick Douglass, a social reformer and freed man who escaped slavery in Maryland before settling in Rochester, New York, and the most photographed American of the nineteenth-century, delivered the 'Lecture on Pictures' in 1861, arguing that photographs had the power to define a person and reveal their humanity. This was during a time in which that subject was informed by ethnographists and naturalists like George Gliddon, Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz, who had made a case for a hierarchical polygenism by 'proving' racial inferiority via a taxonomy of physical traits. During the same decade, former slave, Abolitionist and womens' rights activist Soujourner Truth used portraits of herself in the form of cartes de visite (popular at that time among Civil War soldiers who kept them as reminders of their sweethearts and families, but which were also used to spread political messages) to promote her speeches advocating for the end of slavery. Both Douglass and Truth believed in the power of photography as a medium that allowed self-representation but that also visualised empowerment and defiance for a part of American society more used to this subjecthood being stripped away under the white gaze: their portraits were the early picturings of basic human rights and social equity.

Fast forward more than 150 years and Lawson is photographing an empowering, dignified and visually complex Black aesthetic that celebrates African-American culture, tradition and spirituality, as well as those in locations specific to the Black diaspora such as Haiti, Jamaica, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia. The result, perhaps best showcased in her 2018 Aperture monograph and forthcoming MACK photobook that will accompany her first survey show (opening at ICA, Boston, and touring to other institutions), is the creation of a kind of universe that makes connections between Black communities in what Lawson calls 'an ever-expanding mythological extended family'. That mythology, in part, is due to Lawson's keen eye for constructing scenes that blend her subjects' lived experiences with the imaginary - at once picturing them in the reality of their own homes and domestic spaces, composing intimate scenes between strangers, and recalling stylistic tropes from art-historical paintings.

Take, for example, Holy Mami (2021), in which a woman poses nude before a mural of the Yoruba goddess of weather Ọya; like the majority of Lawson's subjects, she looks directly into the camera, half kneeling on a sofa draped with a pink and beige satinlike material, one hand set against the top of her thigh, the other resting against her tilted, inscrutable face. Adorning her fingers are long, brightly painted acrylic nails. In recent years, artificial nails and nail art have become a beauty trend popularised by celebrities like the Kardashians, whose whiteness has made acceptable what was for many years regarded as a look associated with the 'ghetto', and as such 'inappropriate'. (Indeed, record-breaking athlete Florence Griffith Joyner was mocked by the US media for the four-inch nails she wore during the 1988 Olympics, despite winning three gold medals.) Lawson's photograph, however, shows that acrylic nails are a means of self-expression and pride - in much the same way that jewellery in Renaissance portraiture, for example, would be included as a signifier of one's stature, wealth or family.

Gold jewellery appears in Chief (2019) and Black Gold ("Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise," Rumi) (2021): in the former photograph, made in Ghana, a man sits in his living room wearing gold necklaces, bracelets and a headdress associated with the Asante Empire; in the latter, another man holds up an array of contemporary gold necklaces. For Lawson, the gold jewellery represents a duality in Black culture, one that has a deeper ancestral meaning: "When I was researching gold in West Africa, particularly the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ghana, and most notably in the Asante Kingdom, I realised that the way gold was worn by chiefs and the Asantehene king is similar to the ways in which young Black men in hip-hop culture have worn these amazing gigantic medallion pieces. Those big gold necklaces - that's Asante right there," Lawson explains. But in Black Gold, Lawson's decision to collage in a holographic image of Ron Finley, a Los Angeles-based food-access activist, who is working to renature and raise awareness of 'food deserts' in his city's South Central area, creates a further multiplicity of meanings. "A mentor once said, 'You can't eat gold and you can't eat diamonds,'" recalls Lawson. "I wonder about the ways we value these things in society when, in the Anthropocene age, our planet is becoming more uninhabitable. When one is able to grow one's food, what does that mean in terms of power? And what if the subject in Black Gold was selling collard greens and herbs, making just as much money as he is by selling those necklaces and Ralph Lauren cologne? It's a question of what value and power means now." (Until now, of course, 'black gold' is widely used to describe crude oil.)

Yet more material visual affiliations with classical Western paintings can be found in Ashanti (2005) and Sharon (2007), in the folds of the curtains that behave as a backdrop for the two nude women. There is something of Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (1647-51) in Ashanti, in the pose of the woman lying on a bare blue mattress, yet instead of an insular passive subject gazing at her own reflection, Ashanti turns her head to meet the viewer (or voyeur) eye to eye. That prolonged eye contact in non-Western cultures tends to be regarded as confrontational and a challenge to authority lends the sitter's expression in this photograph a further magnetic intensity. Non-material associations, too, are made visible in Signs (2016), a photograph of four topless men sporting tattoos, whose bodies are dramatically illuminated in the camera's flash - the chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of a Caravaggio painting. Each has their hands raised in various gestures at the camera: two men do a thumbs down; another points his middle finger into a space between the fingers of the other hand; another holds his hands in parallel, forefinger tips and thumbs pressed together, as if holding an invisible sheet of paper or cloth, banknotes or the strings of a puppet. Three of the men's faces are obscured, either by their gestures or by an anonymising pixilation, while the fourth man, his arms raised higher than his fellow subjects, stares directly at the lens, his chin jutting in a strong-willed expression. The issue of hand signs has a contentious history of being associated with gangs - in 2014, teenager Dontadrian Bruce was suspended from school (in one of a number of similar incidents experienced by African-American teenagers) following a photo taken by his mother and published on social media, in which he held up three fingers to reflect the number on his football jersey. The school's quick judgement that the sign was associated with the Vice Lords, a Chicago-based gang, brought to light the racial bias surrounding hand gestures. In Signs, the focus on the subjects' hands as signifiers recalls a historical use of gesture in paintings, which comes from a system established in the ancient Greco-Roman era known as Chironomia - though these are related to rhetorical and oratory practices, the gestures found their way into paintings to denote personal status as well as spiritual intention. In Signs this non-verbal form of communication brings notions around language, interpretation, translation and the use of secret codes to the fore: the meanings of the signals are known by some, yet impenetrable to others.

Collected together in both photobooks, these photographs are further enriched by a format reminiscent of a family album. It's a photographic style that serves as a broad frame of inspiration for Lawson, whose father was a prolific image-maker of their own family and friends, a practice made more widely affordable by Kodak's development of cheaper film and disposable cameras (Lawson's grandmother and mother were also employees of the Rochester-based firm). Multiple depictions of sisters ( Roxie and Raquel, 2010, sit back-to-back on a bed positioned against a bright yellow wall, their arms raised behind their heads, fingertips touching), lovers ( Binky & Tony Forever, 2009, a couple embracing on a gold-duveted bed beside which a green drinks bottle contains yellow flowers, the scene partially reflected by an oval gilt-framed mirror), mothers ( Daenare, 2019, pregnant and reclining nude against a stairway, decorated by floral and spiral motifs on the tiled floor, the painting of flowers on the wall and the curling tattoo at her hip - the image's softness punctured by the ankle monitor strapped to the base of her calf) create a sense of unity, and at the same time they are undeniably individual in their commitment to perform a sense of self. Lawson photographs every stage of life, from a newborn held in a man's arms ( Sons of Cush, 2016) to Monetta Passing (2021), a funereal portrait of a woman lying on a bed of purple satin while a mourner sits beside her - the two images quietly connected by the array of framed family photos displayed on side-tables. By collecting these images in photobooks as extended family albums, Lawson blends vernacular and art photography in a way that effects a fundamental shift in our perception of the normalised didactics of Western art history, and in doing so, confronts, challenges and reframes those tropes and iconographies to shape a contemporary Black aesthetic that is bold, affirmative and loving.
Work by Deana Lawson is on show at the ICA Boston from 4 November through 27 February; Deana Lawson (2021), published by MACK books (£35) accompanies the exhibition at ICA Boston; Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018) is published by Aperture (US$85)

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Black Gold: Deana Lawson's Portraits of Family, Beauty and Pride

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Lives are bound together in a collection of photographs. Two young girls, dressed identically, sit on a sofa: one looks directly at the camera, her painted lips pursed in a pout; the other, her sister perhaps, looks slightly down, as if caught in a daydream, her attention elsewhere.

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Make a photograph that speaks to you about the following question in some way.

What new aspects about the role of a mother have you discovered recently?

Fill in the blank
Mothering as (    )

For example, the artist Annie Hsiao-ching Wang’s work is titled:

“The Mother As a Creator”

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- Unexpected perks of being a (work)horse

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- Walls, mountains, flowers

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- The General

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By the expressions on the mother and daughter's face, I can see there is a some kind of rapport between them, while each one is looking somewhere else...

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Discover metaphors in our homes

Step 1. Take 5 minutes

Take 3 photos of the space or objects that grab your attention.

Step 2 Take 7 mins

Choose one object

Why were you attracted to photograph it? What does this object mean to you?

What does it say about you? Your family? Can it be a metaphor for something ?

VARIATION:
You can start with brainstorming first. Take three objects or spaces and find 3 meaning/associations for each one. Find 3 more. Then choose one object and move onto Step 3

Step 3 Now take a new photograph with this element in the picture. Think about light, colour, texture, and composition that can lead the viewer to get to the story you are trying to say.

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constant outward movement

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“Photographs allow us to capture a moment that would otherwise be lost”

Maue's series "The Evidence of Us"
captures marks and folds that our bodies leave in our home environment. We talked about how colours and light are carefully composed in those images.

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"I photograph in order to hold onto the moment, the place, the trace which I cannot stop, cannot keep, cannot hold."

We looked at Martin's series "Too close to home."

Rosy Martin is an artist-photographer, psychological therapist, workshop leader, lecturer and writer. Her work explores the relationships between memory, identities and unconscious processes through photography, digital imagery and the moving image. Together with Jo Spence, she pioneered re-enactment phototherapy from 1983, and continues to develop this practice.

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I am making this work because I must. I am compelled to do it. No, wait. This is no lazy 'artist as hero' position, this is not work as an expression of myself, not a closed circle that I am refusing to unpick. It does however have a lot to do with the psychic processes that photography necessarily inhabits. The 'absent presence' of which Barthes spoke. I photograph in order to hold onto the moment, the place, the trace which I cannot stop, cannot keep, cannot hold. I know this, and yet however partial, incomplete and vain the attempt, I return and photograph again. Its a pre-bereavement project, born out of my responses to the death of my father and the desperate searching that goes with that first recognition of profound loss. It is a melancholic project, the view-finder misted with soft tears and an ache that no image can assuage. Yet filled too with contradictions, remorse tinged with a longing to escape.

Because I chose to make this a public project, it must speak beyond the particular. Yet I do risk starting from this personal punctum, to evoke an emotional response in the viewer who will not share the precise details of the story.

. As my starting points I drew upon family myths and a detailed exploration of memories of a specific place. I am using photography and video to explore and isolate tiny details and fragments, so the audience only builds up a sense of the space over time. By pushing at the edge of legibility I enable the audience to project their own meanings upon the images, which symbolise and stand in for the continuity and discontinuity of change over time. Too close to home? is an inquiry into the texture of place and memory through the notions of absent presence. The work includes metaphors for the process of ageing

Essay - Too Close to Home?

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I am making this work because I must. I am compelled to do it. No, wait. This is no lazy ‘artist as hero’ position, this is not work as an expression of myself, not a closed circle that I am refusing to unpick. It does however have a lot to do with the psychic processes that photography necessarily…

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Why do we need more art about mothering by mothers?

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Why do we need more art about mothering by mothers?

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“As a society, we haven’t seen enough about the complexity of parenthood.”
Elinor Carucci

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An interview with Home Truths exhibiting artist Elinor Carucci

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Artist to inspire us: Annie Hsiao-ching Wang’

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Artist to inspire us: Annie Hsiao-ching Wang’

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The Mother As a Creator
Annie Hsiao-ching Wang’s The Mother As a Creator

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母親如同藝術家般充滿創造的智慧。母親不但創造了生命，也在親子關係上持續地創造出多樣化的生活體驗。母職是長時期且五味雜陳的過程，非單一品味的甜蜜母子圖或犧牲自我的偉大聖母圖所能表達。而這些大量刻板印象的母親再現，對於處於母職者的我，竟成了一種無以慰藉且難以避免的疲勞轟炸，而這也成為我創作此系列作品的原動力。

從2000年懷孕開始，在不愉悅的孕症與母親無我宿命的恐懼下，我開始嘗試於自身母職中以藝術創作來保有自我的可能性。從一開始紀錄母親的自我如何消失，到在不斷創造的意念下，試圖讓身為母親與藝術家角色的我緊緊結合，以此表露出一種複雜、多樣且具創造性的母職體驗。而這組「母親如同創造者」作品持續進行了20年，它讓我自信地證明，母親除了可以有方法在母職中保有自我，更可以運用創造性來翻轉固有的母職迷思。

從第一張2001年預產期前一天所拍攝的自拍照開始，每隔一段時間，當我們有共同的生命體驗共識時，我會在上一次「我與我的兒子」所拍攝的正式家庭照前拍下我倆的新合照。因此，在時間的推動下，不同年代、不同樣貌的「我與我的兒子」齊一湧現在同一個平面上。由此，不同年代的「我與兒子」及「我們」所共同創作的母子圖，被壓縮在一個奇異空間內不斷地對話，而呈現出複雜、瑣碎且多采多姿的記錄。

這般不斷地創造與自我再現, 如同時光隧道式的視覺再現，不但層層記錄下二十年來的堅持與累積，也讓我們彼此的成長與改變鮮明地展現出來。更重要的是，如此複數多元的女性自我再現概念將計畫持續下去，用生命與時間去挑戰傳統那單一且固定的刻板母親形象。

Like an artist, the Mother is wise in her creation. The Mother not only creates a life, but also a continuous matrix of experiences between Mother and Child. Motherhood is a long-term process full of a myriad of complex feelings. This complexity cannot be expressed solely by saccharine images of Mother and Child, nor by the image of the Mother Incarnate willingly sacrificing herself for the sake of her children. All of these stereotypes of Motherhood are for me a tedious, unavoidable harangue which offers me no consolation. It is from this I derive the original motivation for this series.

Since getting pregnant in 2000, I had been burdened with pregnancy pains and the fear of losing my sense of self, and so I attempted to use art creation to preserve my sense of self during motherhood. From recording how in the beginning the Mother had lost her sense of self, to the notion of constantly creating, I attempted to reconcile my role as both Mother and artist to express a complex, diverse, and creative Motherhood. I am confident that "The Mother as a Creator" series, which took twenty years, not only proves that the Mother can maintain her sense of self, but also that creativity can overturn many of the myths associated with Motherhood.

Starting from the first self-portrait taken in 2001 on the day before I was due to give birth, my son and I would take a new photo together in front of the previous formal family photo every time we had a common life experience. Thus, the different life stages and appearances of my son and me come together to form a single layer. These Mother and Son photos which at different stages of life are overlaid, and from which we created a dialogue compressed into one peculiar space. From within this dimension emerges a complicated, fragmented and diverse recording of Motherhood.

Through this continuous creation and self-reconstruction using time-tunnel artwork, I not only recorded our perseverance and the accumulation of our experiences, I also make it such that we can clearly observe how we grew and developed over twenty years. Most importantly, it is through living and the passing of time that the representations of the many diverse notions of female self-reconstruction can challenge the one-sided and inflexible stereotypes which have traditionally been held towards Motherhood.

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母親如同藝術家般充滿創造的智慧。母親不但創造了生命，也在親子關係上持續地創造出多樣化的生活體驗。母職是長時期且五味雜陳的過程，非單一品味的甜蜜母子圖或犧牲自我的偉大聖母圖所能表達。而這些大量刻板印象的母親再現，對於處於母職者的我，竟成了一種無以慰藉且難以避免的疲勞轟炸，而這也成為我創作此系列作品的原動力。 從2000年懷孕開始，在不愉悅的孕症與母親無我宿命的恐懼下，我開始嘗試於自身母職中以藝術創作來保有自我的可能性。從一開始紀錄母親的自我如何消失，到在不斷創造的意念下，試圖讓身為母親與藝術家角色的我緊緊結合，以此表露出一種複雜、多樣且具創造性的母職體驗。而這組「母親如同創造者」作品持續進行了20年，它讓我自信地證明，母親除了可以有方法在母職中保有自我，更可以運用創造性來翻轉固有的母職迷思。 從第一張2001年預產期前一天所拍攝的自拍照開始，每隔一段時間，當我們有共同的生命體驗共識時，我會在上一次「我與我的兒子」所拍攝的正式家庭照前拍下我倆的新合照。因此，在時間的推動下，不同年代、不同樣貌的「我與我的兒子」齊一湧現在同一個平面上。由此，不同年代的「我與兒子」及「我們」所共同創作的母子圖，被壓縮在一個奇異空間內不斷地對話，而呈現出複雜、瑣碎且多采多姿的記錄。 這般不斷地創造與自我再現, 如同時光隧道式的視覺再現，不但層層記錄下二十年來的堅持與累積，也讓我們彼此的成長與改變鮮明地展現出來。更重要的是，如此複數多元的女性自我再現概念將計畫持續下去，用生命與時間去挑戰傳統那單一且固定的刻板母親形象。 Like an artist, the Mother is wise in her creation. The Mother not only creates a life, but also a continuous matrix of experiences between Mother and Child. Motherhood is a long-term process full of a myriad of complex feelings.

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What is Mothering:

Physical, psychological (intellectual, emotional), spiritual work

Creating, nurturing, affirming, supporting life

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Conditions of working as a mother:
Constant pull between being lost in the midst of taking care of other people and preserving a sense of the self…. Enmeshed identity with our children, our family, our work….

Question:
What new aspects about the role of a mother have you discovered recently?

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10.May 2021
Today we talked about how we can use the elements of the home environment as a metaphor. The objects and space around our home may say something about the daily work of mothering, memories, or what we are processing at the moment in our lives.