She told me, “It was a letdown.” Those are the words my professor used to describe the portrait project I had just so painfully tried to present. Oh, what a stab to the heart!
It’s been several months since that moment, and I’m coming to terms with it. She was right, and I knew she was, even in that moment. I think that’s why it hurt so badly. I knew what she meant because I didn’t like the work either. But, grad school being grad school, I had to push forward. I had to make it work.
Let me backtrack a little bit. The work is called M*thership. You can see some of that project on my page, but the work is now just called M*ther. But you won’t see it all, nor will you see the slideshow I created for class. Because it didn’t work out. At least, not in the way I had intended. The original project was to photograph mothers as an other worldly presence. Something almost alien. I wanted to do that because it’s how I feel as a mom sometimes. Like I’ve been dropped onto a totally different planet, and I have this huge responsibility to not only survive, but keep a whole family intact in a world where I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s a large, unfamiliar feeling. And honestly, a major reason why this initial idea didn’t succeed is that I’m still figuring out how I truly feel. On top of that, I was using other mothers with feelings different than my own to try to express this very personal experience.
This was the image that I, at the time, felt captured my original goal.
I call this portrait, “Leftovers”
But what didn’t connect with others was the metallic blanket wrapped around my subject. I was trying to imitate literal leftover food being wrapped up in foil, tossed to the back of the fridge, and forgotten. The circus tent hat was added to this image by my friend because she thought it was funny, and I felt it was authentic to her. In the end, my professor and the rest of my class saw it as an emergency blanket and kept asking me, “Where’s the emergency? Is there an emergency?”
With that piece of feedback, I tried again. Wanting the alien side of motherhood to be more clearly understood, I tried to use it more as a symbol of contrast. As in, “here’s a mother doing non-motherly things, but is still a mother, deal with it.”
This portrait has been left untitled, at least for now
I love how odd this photo is. I shot it through a sliding glass door, so you can see the trees reflecting back, creating a layered, disorienting image that makes you wonder, what’s going on? But again, the space blanket becomes too distracting. And I gave up on the blanket altogether.
I was so proud of this idea, though. So, I included the “Leftovers” image in the final works of M*ther for my grad school presentation. This is where it starts to make sense that my professor called the project “a letdown”. I went from a very layered and symbolic image to this:
This portrait is called “A woman doing laundry.”
The project totally changed. And yet, I didn’t let go and allow it to change. That’s what killed M*thership.
The original idea was too precious to me. It felt too important to abandon. I wanted the alien idea to work so badly. But it wasn’t the time. It wasn’t the story I could tell—at least, not yet.
I haven’t completely given up on M*thership. But I will carry this painful lesson forward: you can’t force an idea into fruition. All you can do is experiment, listen, and try again when the timing is right.
So, for now, there is M*ther. A series of seriously honest images that pull back the veil on motherhood. It is beautiful sometimes, painfully messy and taxing at others. And yet, we are still here. We still show up.