By Elinor Carucci

My daughter, Emmanuelle, and son, Eden, were born in August of 2014. After a blissful pregnancy, my labour had to be induced; I ended up with an emergency cesarean section that left me wounded, weak, and in pain. A few days later I was sent home to my new life as a mother of twins. The days passed, some quickly and others slowly. At the same time that I was getting to know my babies, falling in love with them, I was also getting to know myself better. Motherhood revealed the best and the worst in me. I was filled with so many emotions. Joy and wonder, love and happiness coexisted with sadness, anger, exhaustion, and anxiety, as well as a sense of mourning for the body I would never have again, the woman I would never be again.

I felt and saw so much in those first months - the beauty and ugliness, the tears and laughter, the extremes you come to know when you’re a new parent. I tried somehow to deal with it all through my camera, hoping to portray the complexity of motherhood as honestly as I could. It was too intense, too rich, to express only through “Madonna and child” images. It’s not that I didn’t have those magical, peaceful moments with my babies, and I did take that kind of photo, but there was so much more to tell and to show.

The need to photograph became even stronger when I realised how painfully apparent the passage of time is in the life of a child. The stages they go through simply fly by. Moments that will never come back have passed before my eyes, easily escaping my camera: the last time I breast-fed Emmanuelle, Eden trying cherries for the first time, their first fight. I felt compelled to preserve those moments somehow. It is a need every parent shares - whether or not we are professional photographers, we all take pictures of our families. It is as if we’re consoling ourselves, counting our days in this world with our children.