On motherhood: Up Close and Personal
It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then, there's me. —Ani DiFranco
Hira Munir Abro
Last of Her Garden
As millennials, we inherit more than recipes or heirlooms; we carry our mothers' histories, silences, unfulfilled dreams, and the child within them who never fully grew. This project is a tender exploration of what remains, both seen and unseen. Through intimate imagery and poetic fragments, I trace the invisible threads between generations, where loss is not just absence but a transformation, and memory blooms where roots once ran deep.This image is from a personal visual essay titled 'Last of Her Garden,' which reflects on my mother's quiet legacy—the kind that lingers in memory, habits, and untended gardens.
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Hira Munir Abro is a documentary photographer born in Sindh, Pakistan. Her work focuses on cultural identity, material histories, and the ever-changing social dynamics that affect the narrative of shared cultures and belief systems.
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Alinne Rezende
Self-portrait
This photo is part of an ongoing project about motherhood, a journey that began long before my pregnancy. It started years earlier when I struggled to conceive, experiencing all the bittersweet emotions that accompanied that journey and uncovering hidden challenges I had never imagined.
In this self-portrait, I am with my son at the beginning of our first spring together. As I continue to discover who I am as a mother, I find the most comforting love in him. Every time I look at him, I see my reflection and the person I have longed to meet. He is the reason all the struggles we faced make sense now. Together, we are learning who we were meant to be all along.
This journey allows me to get to know myself completely and truly connect with my mother, grandmothers, and aunties, where we can share this indescribable experience of motherhood once again.
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Alinne Rezende is a Brazilian photojournalist living in Brazil and Europe. Her work explores the aesthetics and poetics of images and their social and environmental contexts, highlighting photography as an instrumental mechanism of social change.
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Juan Giraldo
Mi Papa, Mi Mama, y Yo (My Dad, My Mom, and I)
I began photographing my mother, Pati, when I was thirty-four—older than she was when she emigrated from Manizales, Colombia, to the United States. Despite the añoranza—that deep yearning—she couldn't afford to look back. Her eyes were fixed on East 17th Street, in our Riverside neighborhood of Paterson, New Jersey.
There, I came to know the world—love, patience, empathy—through and with her. My photographs trace the evolution of my relationship with her, shaped by the gaze of the eldest Colombian son.
This image is from a body of work titled Mi Papa, Mi Mama, y Yo (My Dad, My Mom, and I) and was made in her kitchen in April or May of 2024, shortly after we'd run errands together. She has offered incredible patience over the thirteen years I've been making photographs with her. Yet she still has doubts and insecurities about how she appears in my images. She participates out of love for me and the artistic path she has always supported.
On this Mother's Day, I want her to know she is worthy of the light, grace, and beauty I've seen in the artworks that first inspired me to begin this journey.
Juan Giraldo is a photographer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He was born in Manizales, Colombia and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. His work explores the personal interior spaces of working people (in particular the employees of Great Lakes Reload and his family in Paterson, New Jersey), the textures of a working life and the banal indicators of domesticity that shaped his view of the world, both as a first-generation immigrant and labourer. In addition to this work, he continues photographing his family as part of an ongoing project to examine his relationship with his parents.
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Emily Schiffer
Kin
My project, "Kin," began in 2012, the year we lost my father-in-law and welcomed our first child. Since then, I've been photographing my family during the in-between moments that mark real life. These images trace the push and pull of love, distance, aging, illness, and growth. They show what it means to hold on and to let go. I'm interested in the tension between presence and absence, between being part of something and being alone within it.
As I document these private moments, I'm learning what it means to sustain love over time and across change. What I'm searching for in this project is larger than my family. It lives in the ordinary rituals that shape all of us--in the ways we care for one another, drift apart, and return to the emotional and physical landscape of family.
Here, the grandmothers gather around Julian, our second child, to admire his first yellow poop.
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Emily Schiffer is an American photographer who lives and works in Provincetown. She is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography. Her work is on the intersection of fine art, documentary, and commercial photographs that are spontaneous, intimate, and real.
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Bissera Videnova
The speed of my life changed when I was sixteen—I lost my parents. Since then, my existence has become an ongoing internal dialogue with them, even as I built a family of my own and gave birth. When my son left home to chase his dreams on another continent, those dialogues evolved into conversations between all of us.
These photos are deeply personal, de Profundis. I needed to capture them with something more intimate than a camera lens. My phone—my connection to my son—became the tool. I imagined involving my parents virtually, as if we were all on a conference call across time and space.
The project was sparked by a poem of mine and another shift in geography—my son's and mine, once again, to separate continents. The fall of communism, with all its reverberations, added yet another layer of disorientation, pushing me to translate a new reality. My only steady belief was this: I am a bridge—between generations, across eras.
What I am or have been matters only to me. I see bridges as portals—gateways to other worlds and continents where we all meet. I often return to old photographs, wishing I could rewrite the past they hold. This is my surreal, utopian, and still possible inner world.
The square format of the photos is deliberate. This shape halts momentum, suspends time, and imposes a limit on the experience—just enough to let me catch it, hold it, and make it mine.
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Bissera Videnova is a Bulgarian-born New York-based poet, writer, editor, and translator in her native tongue. Her documentary photography focuses on the consequences of the communist regime, the people's emotional wounds, and pain empathy.
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Greta Rico
Substitute Mother
Since the age of three, when Nicole was orphaned, she has suffered episodes of anxiety that she somatizes with seasons of severe nervous dermatitis. During these flare-ups, her aunt Siomara bathes her, then gently covers her skin with various ointments and creams to soothe the itching.
I took this photograph on the morning of September 17, 2022, at Siomara's home in Naucalpan, State of Mexico, while she was applying the ointments to comfort Nicole.
This image is part of Substitute Mother, a documentary project that explores the psychosocial impacts and trauma experienced by children orphaned by feminicide, and the women who step in to care for them in Mexico—a country where, according to UN Women, ten women are murdered each day due to gender-based violence. This project emerges from the most intimate place: my own family. It tells the story of my cousin Siomara, who became a Substitute Mother to her niece Nicole after her sister, Nicole's mother, was a victim of feminicide.
----Based in Mexico City, Greta Rico is a documentary photographer, journalist, and feminist educator who focuses on issues of gender, climate change, and food. Her work explores new social representations in contemporary visual culture. Through her projects, she reflects on the care economy, coloniality, and the social trauma of current phenomena.
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Jac Kritzinger
The world you're looking for
My mother passed away almost 10 years ago. I don't have children, and what remains of my kin is scattered and scarred. When it comes to family, I can only look backward, not forward. Nostalgia haunts my view of the present. This series is a visual attempt to fuse opposing, deeply personal worlds.
The image is a superimposition of one of my father's old film slides, where my mom is holding my sister, against the pixelated image of a place I once called home. In the foreground is a film slide from my father's photo archive—fragments of everyday life from our distant family history—a simpler, happier, decisively analogue world faded by time. In the background are pixelated photographs I've taken across the various places I've come to call home in recent years. They suggest a far more complex, marginalized state of being, both personal and universal, all the more splintered in the face of an advancing digital technocracy.
I was curious to see what might happen if I literally superimposed one reality over another: the concrete past over the distant present. Where words fall short and memory stirs, as if raised from an eternal child's grainy slumber.
In the end, only a fractured image remains.
---Jac Kritzinger was born in the lush wasteland of 1970s South Africa. A wandering light smith, workaholic, and dinosaur toeing the viper line, his lens always aims to venture beyond the layers of collective reality, revealing something deeper, darker, more ethereal, and sublime. He is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa.
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Hannah Kozak
Self Portrait with Momma
A painting of my momma before her brain damage from her abusive second husband in 1974.
She loved the color orange, and so do I. I created this portrait of us with film.
My mother took her last breath 2 years, 1 month and 23 days ago, on March 18, 2023, at 1:12 am. It was just the two of us in her bedroom at the nursing home where she had lived for the past eight years. Just like it was the two of us, every time one of the nurses called me in the middle of the night, the last 4 months, usually around 1 am, when she was taken by ambulance to the emergency hospital. My phone was always on at night. I'd jump out of bed, throw on sweatpants and rush to meet her so she wouldn't be alone in the hospital, as I knew she was scared in an unfamiliar place.
It was just me, my momma and her breath. Her breath was going slower and slower. Calm and serene. She would inhale, and the exhale was taking longer and longer. Sometimes it made me jump a little as it sounded like she would not exhale. I kept telling her that I loved her, that we would be together in another lifetime, that she was the best mother I could've ever had. I told her to go to the light. I kept holding her hand, rubbing her face with the orange face cream she loved from Origins.
Her breath became extra slow; I looked at my watch. 1:12 AM. She inhaled and didn't exhale. Her soul had left her physical body. Silence, stillness, quiet. Is my momma really gone? There was almost a make-believe quality to it all. I felt some relief that my mother wouldn't be trapped in a body that no longer served her. She suffered, and I'm not going to romanticize suffering. Death deserves reverence. I hope her final moments were peaceful and graceful. It appeared that way because she had learned to master the art of acceptance after being institutionalized for half her life.
Even though my mother's life was filled with tragedy, she met life with grace. She met death with grace.
It's not easy for my soul to contain that I will never see her again in this lifetime. Where there is deep grief, there is great love. My phone is off now at night.
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Hannah Kozak is a Los Angeles-based autobiographical photographer. Born to a Polish father and Guatemalan mother, she has spent over five decades capturing the people and places that move her emotionally. For Hannah, photography is not just art—it's a powerful tool for healing, something she understands through personal experience.
Natalie Behring
My nephew, Ezra Behring, clings to his mother's legs as she does the dishes in Ashton, Idaho, on July 28, 2021. My brother and sister-in-law say he was a clingy baby, having spent most of his early life with only his parents and a few others during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking at this image, I'm reminded—yet again—of how deeply moved I am by the strength and heart of my sister-in-law, Leslie. She bravely brought three children into the world while working as an emergency room nurse in Alabama. Somehow, she's done it all with grace, humor, and boundless love.
Her children are not just well cared for—they radiate her charisma. Each of them carries a spark of her spirit, resulting in personalities that are equal parts hilarious and beautifully unique. She manages to keep them alive and happy and has bequeathed them her charisma, resulting in hilarious, quirky personalities. They are not only well cared for, they shine with her light.
My niece once confided in me, completely earnestly, that she had a Funyun stuck in her throat for a year because she could taste it whenever she ate tacos. And my nephew, full of joy and mischief, once let a dog lick the inside of his mouth while laughing uncontrollably. He also plans to direct Chucky 5 in the future, and I don't doubt he will.
These moments, and countless others, have become treasured parts of our family story. I'm so grateful my brother found someone who brings out the best in him and makes our entire family better by simply being herself.
----Natalie Behring is a photographer based in Victor, Idaho. She covers news and features throughout Idaho, Wyoming and the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
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Kristine Nyborg
Learning to Speak Bear
He was only six when I found this note stuck to the fridge. I've always loved this image—it captures the deep, often contradictory emotions of motherhood.
It was meant as a punishment for me, the sharpest thing a child could think to say. And yet, it was written with such care—each missing letter carefully substituted, the words chosen in a moment of quiet after big feelings.
He doesn't like this photograph. When I asked him why, he looked up at me with soft, sad eyes and said, 'Because it's not true.'
This image lives in my book Learning to Speak Bear, a reminder of the complexity and tenderness woven through the journey of raising a child—and being human together.
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Kristine Nyborg is a Norwegian freelance photographer based in Ottawa, Canada. Her work centers on long-term projects exploring the intersection of mental health and sustainability, with a focus on personal narratives and the relationships people have with themselves and the world around them. Her book, Learning to Speak Bear, was published by Yoffy Press in 2023.
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Malin Westermann
This photo captures a time when I was completely immersed in the highs and lows of new motherhood—intoxicated by it, really. I had never felt more powerful and more exhausted all at once. My son is four months old, yet I remember so little from that time. That's part of why this image means so much to me. It holds a moment I can't fully recall, and reminds me just how powerful it is to be a mother.
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Malin Westermann is a photographic artist living and working in Oslo, Norway. Drawn to the quiet magnificence, fragility, and fleeting nature of everyday life—especially since becoming a mother—she approaches her work with deep sensitivity toward all stages of life, with a special focus on motherhood. Born in Bodø, in Northern Norway, Malin was captivated by photography at an early age, inspired by watching her grandmother use the medium as a form of personal expression.
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Terra Fondriest
Summer Itches
As we walked across the neighbor's field in the early days of our Ozarks summer, my daughter lifted her shirt and asked me to scratch her back. Just a simple request, but one so familiar—one of those quiet, ordinary moments that somehow captures everything.
Living in the forest means living with the constant company of bite-y bugs—chiggers, ticks, gnats, and mosquitos waiting just outside the door. Around here, itches are just part of the season, part of the rhythm of life.
But when I look at this photo, it brings back more than the bugs. It brings back the warmth of that day, the way the sun felt on our shoulders, and the closeness of these fleeting summer moments with my children. Being a mother in the Arkansas Ozarks means learning to love the wildness and the small rituals that come with it, like scratching an itchy back in the middle of a field.
Terra Fondriest has been navigating the wild adventure of motherhood in the Arkansas Ozarks for the past decade. After the birth of her first child in 2011, she shifted from life as a wildland firefighter and wilderness wrangler to becoming a mostly stay-at-home mom on a quiet hilltop homestead.
What began as a way to document her growing family soon evolved into a passion for photography and visual storytelling. Through her long-term project Ozark Life, Terra captures the rhythms of daily life—her own and that of her community—woven into the land and seasons. Her work explores the richness of rural living, honoring the details that make Ozark life unique, and the shared humanity that connects us all.
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Adriana Teresa Letorney
Untitled, 2019
Motherhood is humbling. Some days it crowns me; other days, it crucifies me. I've never felt so much love and concern for everything, anything, or anyone until I had my son.
I struggled with infertility for years, so he is my miracle baby. Not a day goes by that I don't feel immense gratitude. Being a mother changed my life. I thought I didn't know how to love—he taught me I did. I thought I didn't know how to take care of myself or another, but he showed me that I could. I thought I wasn't enough, yet he reminds me every day that I am, simply by being. He's just living fully and wants to be loved, like I once did when I was his age. Only now do I realize how deeply it matters to a child to feel loved.
I've learned more about life from motherhood than from any other experience. As I reflect on being a mother, I am empowered to stand so that others cannot dim my light, control my body, or take away my rights as a woman. It is not your choice to make.
That said, not a day goes by that I don't have to remind myself: I don't have control over the external. I can't protect him from all that is happening during these times. There is life, and then there is the state of the world we are living in. I need to prepare him for both. This world is beautiful and cruel all at once. We live what we live. And I do my best to be there for him fully.
Motherhood has taught me to value time, family, friendships, and the small choices I make each day—choices that shape our lives and his life. I've never loved so deeply, and that's why motherhood has humbled me so profoundly. It is okay to be strong and vulnerable at the same time. I've learned it comes with the territory.
When I look at this photo, I see a woman who, for a moment, lost her identity—because I surrendered so completely to motherhood and work that I nearly forgot who I was. I burned out, and it took years to reconnect.
Now in my 40s, I am all of me. I don't need to be more and will never be less. I need to be me. I need to be present for as long as I am alive. My son is a reminder to breathe.
To all those who love completely: Happy Mother's Day.
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Adriana Teresa Letorney is the co-founder of Visura. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she lives in Vermont.
