Artist Statement
“Unconventional, artful, expressive. Angry, defiant, prideful. Cool, compassionate, independent.” These words were written by me to describe my mother for her 2006 obituary. The portrait in the newspaper depicted my mother looking out, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. I wasn’t surprised when a stranger, intrigued by the obituary, came to the memorial service to learn more about her life. My project The Twenty Years Since Daddy Left spans 1978 to 1998, which corresponds with my first two decades of involvement in photography. When my dad left and moved out of state with another woman and her children, it was a year of deep despair for my mother. A homemaker for 27 years who could not drive, my mother was thrust into a life she almost chose to end.
Mom was a freethinking, opinionated woman, and her experiences after the divorce create a compelling narrative that has both personal and universal meaning. As a visual storyteller, some of my images of her are candid; others are posed environmental pictures. Our lives were inextricably intertwined, and these photographs depict moments chronicling our lives together. The series explores her personal evolution, my photographic journey and the mother/daughter relationship as she adapted, changed and evolved over time.
Accustomed to visits over the years with my camera in hand, she reluctantly gave me free access to photograph her. As a result, I now have a large archive of images from which to create this body of work. The project moved to a new phase in 1998 when I asked my mom to look at the photographs. Eventually, my mother, an undiscovered writer and poet, began collaborating with me. Writing in her own hand on selected proof prints, she wrote short captions about what she was thinking and feeling about herself or the experience when each image was made. On one image she wrote”… I am not concerned that Theresa is naked. She is the essence of a free spirit. It is acceptable to me, mostly.”
An added component of images that were made in the last years of my mother’s life will complete the project and serve as an epilogue. Suffering from dementia in her final years, she could rarely respond in writing to my photographs of her, although in 2005, she did just that. Together, we viewed the entire Twenty Years images and text. In spite of her expressive language aphasia diagnosis (a gradual progression of losing the ability of speech and understanding), she was able to focus on these final images of herself, and write captions. One caption read, “I came to the front window, I always see, to for like other people. Outside, I like talk to, some.”
