By Guia Besana

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures" Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Subjects dealing with the identity of women have always drawn my attention. Treating themes I relate to make it possible for me to go unintentionally in depth. Becoming a mother and facing new emotions led me to a different kind of visual narration to describe what is true and I thought that illustrating the complex experience of pregnancy and motherhood was worth being translated into a photographic work.

This series, titled Baby Blues, explores the emotional and fragile world women encounter during motherhood through a process of staging and symbolic representation of truth. It might sound like a paradox but I believe that constructing an image from an inner vision can be as honest as recording it from real life. It is another way of showing something others can relate to, respecting a distance but demanding questioning.

I began using a large format camera to stage and recreate images where the subject is a mother in a very specific state of mind seizing the tension between what seems like an obvious circumstance and a deeper implication. The purpose of this series is to preserve the emotional experience that becoming a mother entails.

In Baby Blues women are frozen in a different time, far from what is happening around them: they look as if they were forgotten in a scene. These representations of female introspection are contemporary portraits resulting from themes such as fear, loss, identity, isolation, fusion and separation from one’s children, and fleeting childhood memories that recur...