That’s mother: Five photographers to know for Mothering Sunday

As soon as a child is born they have a camera thrust in their face, smitten parents capturing their son or daughter’s every gurgle. Some artists have turned family photography into an art form, flipping the lens onto the ones that gave them life, specifically mothers. Here are some of our favourites.

From Mom [2021], Charlie Engman

In a series that was 11 years in the making, Charlie Engman captures his mother Kathleen in images which speak, not only to the mother/son relationship, but to Kathleen as a woman independent of him. Engman treats her as he would any other model, but the work is suffused with the sense of collaboration – and as audiences we can hardly help but project our own familial neurosis onto them.

My Mother, Pennsville, Ohio [1970] Nancy Rexroth

‘We were going to a yard sale, and stopped in a cemetery to have some eggs and sandwiches, the wind flew the bubble right out of her bouffant hairdo, she had closed her eyes.’ Rexroth used a low quality camera in order to create images with a kind of hazy distortion, making them feel dream like, or like the fuzzy picture in a memory.

From Mother’s [2000-5], Miyako Ishiuchi

Although Miyako Ishiuchi did take photographs which captured her mother’s physical appearance and body, it is the photos of her possessions, taken after her death, that are perhaps more evocative. The lipstick which might have been her signature shade, the hairbrush with hair still tangled in its bristles, the shoe with the imprint of a foot – intensely personal items which symbolise a departed body.

Magdelena Wosinska

Anyone who has had to care for a parent through ill-health, or at the end of their life, will recognise the combination of tenderness, love and pain that Magdelena Wosinska’s photographs of her mother Wilhelmina contain. The role reversal can be excruciating but can strengthen the bond, and create an intimacy that might not have been felt in the intervening years since childhood. Wilhelmina died in 2021, and Magdelena’s Instagram is full of heartfelt tributes to her memory – these photographs of her final years are perhaps the most remarkable.

Momme [2008 & 2018] LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier took these two dual portraits a decade apart. They distill the subjects of identity, politics, survival, and community which LaToya often explores in her photographic practice, and their composition speaks to an unbreakable bond between mother and daughter. The artist is of her mother’s body.

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