The mother thing in pictures: from antagonism to affection

Abstract

The maternal embrace is an iconic pose for women posing with children. Characteristic of mother and child depictions in Christianity, even contemporary images appear as loaded patriarchal symbols. This essay examines the taxonomy of the mother across a range of photographic images from 1920 to the present. Looking for representational alternatives to the passive, silent mother images that dominate photography and visual culture, I want to show the mother to be more diverse than widespread representations will have us believe. I find autobiographies and photographic self-portraits by ambivalent mothers, lesbian mothers, black mothers, and childless mothers. These offer new possibilities and critical voices often absent from feminist discourses that usually deride or celebrate motherhood in overly simplistic terms. In turn, I have sought to complicate representations of the mother and the maternal embrace by analysing my embodied experience of being her. As a photographer-mother, I have floundered between antagonism and affection toward pictures of women with children. In response, I transport the mother from one world of appearances to another: from the symbolic realm of passivity, stillness, softness and silence to the affective and embodied realm of touching seen in the close-up zoomed-in details of mother and child imagery.