Description:
In this print of two connected black and white photographs, a woman sits with her child in each frame. Both are against a backdrop of newspaper clippings, giving the illusion that the two photographs are one. The woman on the left sits at a 3/4 angle in baggy jeans. Her baby has her hands in her her mouth. On the right, another woman sits facing the camera head on, her child neatly carried in her lap. Note the race of the two portraits--the left woman is white with a black baby while the right one is black with a multiracial baby.
Label Text:
In 1989, Matthews photographed portraits of women family members and friends. Her subjects sat in a studio covered with newspaper cuttings, a public backdrop to intimate narratives. Matthews returned to this series nineteen years later, rephotographing her subjects and marking cyclical flows between generational pasts and futures. Here we see Nancy mothering Amira, and Amira mothering Samari. We might look for resemblances, borrowed behaviors, shared attitudes—Nancy and Amira both hold their children with hands cupped and curling; they both look at the camera with patience. Or we might look for the characteristics that mark children as separate, distinct, defiantly other than their mothers. Matthews photographs mothering and having been mothered as a transmission between bodies and across time.
Tags:
infants; children; mothers; mother and child; portraits; time; women; families Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2013.31 |
