Motherhood

My project named Motherhood Series shows how hard a housewife works every day. The idea of this series was started with my recent life and ended in the general immigrated female’s lives.

In my project, I dressed up as a normal housewife and shot in the real scenes. The main feature is dramatic conflicts. Most pictures have a conflict between the mother and her son. When the mother ironed her husband’s shirt, she was yelling at her son because he was playing with her tripod. When the mother was drying the baby’s clothes and a Princeton towel on the deck, her son stood in the clothes basket, they were looking in the opposite direction. The Dinner, a still life image, showed the family statues. In my pictures, the conflict is not only between the mother and her son but also between the wife and husband, which is the potential conflict.

The man, who as the husband and father, is sometimes absent in the pictures. “Absence” is another feature in my project. Actually, he is never absent, he showed up via some signals, such as part of the body, bath towel, clothes or his toy collections. As the main actress in this series, the mother showed up in most of the pictures, but nobody knows what she looks like. Furthermore, this mother is not just myself, it represents a lot of mothers in the same situation who want to find who I am.

Life is always like a drama. I expressed daily life scenes, which happen every day in every family. The conflicts or struggles are both familiar to every female.

Housework is shown to be a vexed life arena. When a mother is overwhelmed with the chores and taking good care of the family, she loses herself. She may miss good opportunities to develop her own career because she doesn’t have enough time and space. She has to give up her own habits and stay at home instead. I am dressing up as a normal mother and wife. I lost myself in tough housework, but still, am trying to figure out who I am.

Looking at history as a way of better understanding the present. Photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change.