Sharon Boothroyd

Photo by Ana Casas Broda

Susan Bright is a photography curator currently based in New York. She has become a prominent figurehead in her contribution to photography by showcasing artists who are pushing the boundaries of the medium. In doing so she highlights exciting movements within photography and keeps the bar high for the next generation of artists.

You may have some of her books on your bookshelf, they include Art Photography Now, Auto Focus, Face of Fashionand How we are: Photographing Britain, the show she co-curated with Val Williams, which was the first major photography exhibition ever held at Tate Britain.

She is currently researching representations of motherhood for a practice led PhD in curating.

Photo by Julie Blackmon

Photo by Ana Casas Broda

Why did you first become interested in how motherhood is represented in art and the media?
‘My daughter was born in 2008. At this time I had an established career as a photography curator and writer and knew little of childbirth and childrearing. Like many of my female contemporaries I had established my identity through my career (not my family) and as such had little experience around children.

‘I reached for books, photographs, magazines and journals to help me through a tumultuous shift in my personal identity and was surprised by what I read and saw. It is important to note here that I gave birth in New York, where I continue to live and work. It was here that the other two main factors that drove me to this investigation became apparent.

‘Firstly, I began to notice the increased imaging of mothers in celebrity culture and with this what seemed like a subliminal messages that becoming a mother was the ‘right thing to do’ as apposed to having a career. The irony seemed to be lost that the only reason these women were of interest to the public was because of their careers.

‘Parallel to that much of the literature I read seemed to place impossible demands on a mother in pursuit of perfection. Becoming a ‘perfect mother’ seemed to me, like a national American obsession, bolstered by images of happy mothers smiling from the front covers of the ‘Red Top’s’ in print media. I found this retrograde and far from my reality. But photographically I was fascinated by the  sheer quantity of magazines and websites dedicated to celebrity mothers. I kept seeing the same poses repeated again and again. I immediately wanted to investigate why there seemed to be such a thirst for mothering in the media.’

Photo by Trish Morissey

Photo by Julie Blackmon

Photo by Ana Casas Broda

What have been your discoveries?
‘Well first and foremost that in the early Twenty First century the presence of the mother figure has moved from the margins to the mainstream – be that in literature (with the advent of ‘chick lit’ and indeed more serious literature); pornography (with the ever expanding MILF genre) or in mainstream television.

‘In American politics the status of the mother in both the campaigns of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton were highly visible and central to their political identity. In Britain the anxiety over Kate Middleton’s fecundity consumes tabloid space illustrating both poles of culpability.

‘Journalistic and popular books on the subject are on the increase and the online versions of celebrity magazines are dedicating whole sections to the cycles of mothering – from conception to an intense focus on the children of the famous. Hollywood has naturally followed (or lead) the trend with an increasing number of films with Motherhood (and parenting) as the central plotline.

‘Apart from the ideological messages mentioned briefly above in much of the media I also noticed how little pregnancy is imaged in fine art and how it has become increasingly sexualized in the media. I am enjoying delving into 19th Century photographs of pregnancy and seeing how complicated they are. There is too much to go into here (I dedicate a chapter to it in my thesis). The historiography is important and somewhat hidden. Breast feeding is still pretty much hidden in the media although the recent TIME cover which shows a three year old being breast fed may have visual repercussions. I am not so sure though… it may actually set the imaging of this aspect of mothering backwards as everything will be compared to that.

‘I also discovered a genuine anxiety about aging and am curious to find out how representations of mothers fits into this.’

Photo by Toni Wilkinson

Photo by Geraldine Kang

What is the main assertion of your research and exhibition?
‘In terms of my thesis research what I have found lacking, in regard to analyzing the making and reception of images of mothers, is a coherent critical approach or stance to fully understand the implications of this phenomenon and its historical precedents which is not reliant upon psychoanalysis. Personally I feel that much of the art making and theory surrounding the Mother figure has been hijacked by psychoanalysis and this is not of interest to me and my investigations.

‘I have turned to body of work commonly understood as ‘Postfeminism’ to help me to articulate my ideas. The term is contested, provocative, troubling, perplexing, contradictory and disconnected. There is no unified origin and it has often come to be understood as a buzzword in mainstream media. It often identifies itself with youth and an anxiety of aging and can be superficial.

‘For me there is nothing superficial about mothering and nothing ‘post’ about feminism (if  we are taking ‘post’ to mean that which has gone before to be redundant). The term, its knotted definition and the impact in therms of the Mother figure can only work up to a point and then there is an estrangement, or disjuncture, between theory and practice. I am attempting to lay the foundations for a new way of considering contemporary photographic images of mothering within a postfeminst discourse (however contested that term is) and in turn aim to contribute a radical corrective to the lack of critical examinations in early Twenty First Century postfeminist critical writing.

‘The exhibition has a slightly different emphasis than the bulk of the thesis. I turn to fine art photography in order to articulate my ideas. It takes as its inspiration and genesis Mary Kelly’s lesser-known photographic piecePrimapara (1974) which together with Post Partum Document (1973-1979) demonstrated in a powerful and groundbreaking way, that the mother-child motif could be addressed in a completely new way. As an important touchstone in the second wave of Feminism of the 1970s, the work, and the concurrent critical debates around the subject, came from a highly psychoanalytic point of view.

‘This exhibition, however, comes at a time when contemporary photography is no longer marginalized, but is at the center of visual culture, and theoretical and feminist debates have moved on. With this in mind the work featured here is highly personal, often documentary and is subject driven rather than theoretically motivated.

‘My curatatorial standpoint is to present bodies of work by different artists and articulate viewpoints work compliments and complicates in order to avoid a didactic and monolithic view of mothering. All the work challenges and agitates traditional passive views of Motherhood.

‘The work tends to be intensely personal or autobiographical in focus, which doesn’t mean it can’t connect to wider universal themes, articulate metaphorical messages and be intellectually rigorous. It presents an interpretation of the subject that highlights the complexity of the subject and does not shy away from emotional or emotive subjects.

‘The photographers I have selected tend to work on large uncompromising bodies of work over many years and as such some are still on-going. I hope this exhibition is a rare opportunity to explore new interpretations and insights on an ancient theme in a thorough and contemporary manner.

‘The central argument of the exhibition will be the investigation of the complex and demanding experience of motherhood through the transitions that occur to a woman’s identity by becoming or being a mother. These transitions and the way they affect identity is explored by not only concentrating on the mother figure herself but by focusing on how it effects those around her. It shows mothers to be both blessed and bound with a simultaneous need to escape and connect. It investigates what it means to have a personal identity become one that is associated with another person. It focuses on the transitions and the importance of those shifts in identity and the effect this has on partners, friends and children.

‘It will be shown at The Photographers’ Gallery at the end of 2013 and will tour through Europe and the USA.’

Photo by Toni Wilkinson

Photo by Geraldine Kang

Photo by Trish Morissey

How have other art forms and their theories influenced your research?
‘I am concentrating on photography in fine art and the media. I have found that I have had to look very closely at the history of the Madonna and of course this means painting, but over all my concentration is photography. This has turned out to be both a stumbling block and a liberation in terms of turning to photo theory. I have always found photo theory to be limiting, self referential and restrictive to the endless ways of understanding photography. Plus it can be dull and badly written.

‘Within my investigations there are two pertinent factors that are directly relevant to my relationship to photo theory worth mentioning here. Firstly, is the significant lack of research and sophisticated analysis of commercial and advertising photography within the literature. The lack of critical writing regarding the representation of commercial photography beyond seeing it as an ‘ideological text’ is a serious lack in the wealth of literature on photography, but also a liberation as it allows room for me to use more interdisciplinary approaches.

‘And secondly, it can be argued, what really drives the main focus of photo theory (and indeed much of its histories) is an ‘ontological desire’ to understand the essence of photography. This ontological desire at the very core of photo theory is not of interest to me. It is not what drives my investigations into the medium and certainly not the thesis. It is for these reasons I want to claim some relative autonomy from my predecessors and precedents and engage in other disciplines.

‘Finally, I have always found photo theory to be intrinsically hostile to a ‘simple’ historical (I use that term with full knowledge that history is never simple) or subject lead readings of images and has feared it may be associated with revisionism of Modernism. I, however, believe looking at a relatively new medium such as photography, especially when it is concerned with a very ancient subject matter, charting the changing representations and entomology is vital. This doesn’t mean to say I reject photo theory entirely. I use it up to a point and then turn to other ideas when it can no longer be useful for me.’

Photo by Trish Morissey

Photo by Julie Blackmon

What are your hopes for the future representation of mothers within photography and the vernacular?
‘My thesis is not an examination into Maternal Practices in fine art making. There is a distinct, and important, difference between Maternal Practices and my interest in representation of Mothers in the media.

‘By Maternal Practices I am referring to feminist artists dealing with Motherhood  and who represent the range and complexity of the mothering experience – one far removed from an idea of clichéd selflessness. Artists like Mary Kelly, Sally Mann, Susan Hiller, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Renne Cox, Catherine Opie and more recently Tierney Gearon who are conceptually rigorous and crucial to this history.

‘My exhibition aims to expand what the term ‘Mother’ can mean and its effects on an artist’s identity. I see the work I have chosen sitting slightly outside of this trajectory.

‘In terms of vernacular photography I am seeing more and more how celebrity images are being copied and fed into a familiar lexicon. The most obvious and striking example of this is the famous pose which Demi Moore adopted on the front cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz. Go to flickr, or any other similar photo sharing site and you will see what I mean. Pregnancy was long hidden both privately and publicly in photo history. This image changed that.’

Photo by Justine Kurland

Photo by Trish Morissey

This post was contributed by photographer Sharon Boothroyd via her photo blog, Photoparley.

I fell in love with this work a while ago when I was just starting to think about making my daughter the subject of my new series, Edelweiss. I got the book for Christmas and found the portraits entirely compelling. The light, the colour tones, the subject matter, the intimacy, the tension, the domestic, the carefully calculated composition and the mirroring or reflection of the daughter on her mother and vice versa. I wanted to find out more from someone who successfully made a series on motherhood that was neither corny or clichéd but also to go into more depth about the projects scope as a piece of photographic art.

By retaining control of the cable release and including it in the images Aglaé both slows down our reading and determines the mood of the images. Locations, positions and clothing are not left to chance but down to the deliberation of the artist. By making us aware of this control Aglaé reminds us that she is a creator, not simply responding to daily happenings but in some sense performing them for us, allowing us to see what she wants us to see. In this simple but crucial act she confuses the viewer with what is fact. She makes us question what is really there each day and wonder why she has chosen to include it in the frame. What reality has she decided to let us see and therefore why? What does she want to communicate through these images?

I love the very composed and deliberate nature of these images that take place in the everyday. The restrained background noise doesn’t inhibit the reading, in fact every component adds to it, like part of a mis-en-scene familiar to cinema where the director uses props and locations to enhance the essence of the story. From the surrounding elements, like fruit, play parks, painting utensils, we can deduce information about the existence of the subjects but they aren’t just clues, they are also symbols, characteristics and idiosyncrasies of their life together. Things that we all have equivalents of. What is your apartment block? Face-mask? Sleep routine? This project is about one mother and her daughter but it is also about all of us. What are your childhood memories? What do you do or not do with your children? What would you like to do or have done?

Aglaé Bory is based in Paris. Her series Correlations has been exhibited widely and received honourable recognition including second place in the Terry O’Neill Award and inclusion in the Voies Off Festival.

What excites you about photography and why did you begin taking pictures?
‘It was like a call. When I was 15, I was impressed by the mystery of photography. I think I felt the tension and the strength created by the frozen frame. Through photography I discovered one can look at things and people with emotion. Now I still love the power of the frozen frame and the relationship it has with time.’

Who / what are your influences?
‘There are many photographers I love, like Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Diane Arbus, Paul Graham, Taryn Simon… They are all working between reality, document and fiction. I relate to this approach very much.

‘I discovered photography through Edouard Boubat, Arnaud Claas, Henri Cartier-Bresson and other classics of black and white photography, but with high emotion. They taught me how photography can speak and create meaning, through centering and especially through off-camera which has been very important for me. Now though my photographic language has moved far from these photographers.

‘I only take color photographs and the definition of my way of taking photographs could be “decided moment”, not the Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”.*

‘Apart from this I find important influences in literature, like in Marguertite Duras’s work. She used direct and strong words, and wrote with an awareness of the necessity to express things using specific words.

‘Photography shows and freezes things, I try to see what is invisible, to show what is hidden, to freeze what is volatile. I especially love doing this because photography is dealing with tangible reality so I try to explore the power of photography by approaching it’s boundaries as a medium.’

What is your favourite aspect of Corrélations?
‘The process was very important and very exciting. But so was the topic. There were many things to include in this work, and I’m really happy to have integrated them all together.

‘First, this work was a necessity. I strongly felt the compulsion to make these images. I thought it was impossible that all these ‘small’ but determinant moments should be left untold. I wanted to show all those little intimate and harmless things that we are repeating every day and which we choose to call life. I felt the need to photograph them in order to be displayed, to be seen and to be looked upon as an attempt to make an inventory of time.

‘In all my work I try to create meaning with images. That’s why I’m a photographer.

‘The process was also very important. The cable release in my hand is visible, so the moment-of-shooting itself is visible too. I like this. These photographs are self-portraits, so I was ‘blind’. I had to imagine the postures, to see not with my eyes, but with my mind. It helped me to go inside myself and reach interiority.

The closeness of your relationship with your daughter is very apparent in your work. When I’m photographing my own daughter sometimes she resists the camera and I have to find the balance between respecting her desires and getting a good shot. What is your experience of this and how did you overcome or strike a balance?
‘When I started this work she was 2. So she saw this like a game. I asked her to stay still, which was not that easy at first! But she quickly felt that there was something strange, something that was important for me. So she brought herself to do it, to be serious, and to listen to what I said to her. Then she discovered that something was happening between her, me and the camera.

‘She resisted sometimes but more because she had to stop what she was doing (playing) than because she didn’t want to be photographed.

‘When I was taking the pictures, I didn’t speak to her with the same tone of voice and she sensed that. At this moment I was more a photographer than her mother. Creating this sort of distance was important to separate the work and the family life. I think it also helped this work to be what I really wanted it to be: not trivial but emotional and photographic.

This project is not solely about you and your circumstances and motherhood, there is a wider narrative at play. What are your biggest hopes for your viewer?
‘This work is, more than anything, a photographic series which questions the photographic rules and roles. The photographer produces the images before choosing which one he wants to show. This is an artistic gesture which exists to establish a dialogue through ideas, images and the photographic tool. Even though the camera is a tool which takes it’s aim on reality, it does not work of it’s own accord. It is a tool to establish relationships.

‘The question to ask oneself is what kind of relationship is to be established, through which medium and for what purpose?

‘The work relies on personal aspects which I hope add meaning and reveal the potential and the peculiarities of photography. I questioned the relationship between time, space and the people and I wrote this relationship with the light. The light brings a timelessness to these moments. Once chemically condensed and stripped of insignificance, they stop being the substratum of everyday life and acquire the status of archetypes.

‘With this fictionalised approach the viewer can easily identify fragments of their own experience, recognising parts of their own lives. Ideally though, they would abandon personal perspectives and embrace the collective flux of memories.’

What does your daughter think of the photographs?
‘She likes them.

‘But I let her stay away from what the pictures I take end up becoming. She knows there have been exhibitions and she saw the book, but we don’t often speak about it. I explained it to her in simple terms and she understands that is an artistic work, not a family album. This is my business so it was important for me that she should stay in her child’s world. On the other hand, I think we will discuss it again when she is older, because there are personal emotions and feelings involved.’

What advice would you give to women balancing a photography career and bringing up young children?
‘I think it’s not easy sometimes because we have to balance it with family life and because being a photographer, as artists, doesn’t stop at a fixed hour in the day. It’s not a job that has schedules. And for creating projects, ideas, pictures, we need time, we need sometimes to be alone, to be free of obligations.

‘But women are still managing the everyday life and this is true for any woman doing any kind of job. The bond with children is indefectible and it is not easy to find a good way to manage all these different feelings. But the more the children grow up the easier it becomes. These situations can be interesting for our work because we are faced by a lot of emotions that feed our creativity and make us stronger.’

What impact has the series had on your relationship with each other?
‘We did something unusual which questioned the bond that exists between a woman and her child. It was an experience of life. Now things have been said and many things are easier to feel. It was like a silent discussion.’

Are you working on anything new / what’s next for you?
‘Yes, I’m working on different projects. One about “Inner sees” and another one in my native land, both exploring the relationship between landscape and emotions. And I continue my work in the press, for newspapers and magazines. However I do continue to show “Corrélations” in different places.’

This post was contributed by photographer Sharon Boothroyd via her photo blog, Photoparley.