Birth of mother 2022

The project focuses on becoming a mother, the fear of childbirth and illuminates postpartum life in images full of symbols and metaphors.

For me, photography is an instrument for deep self-reflection and self-therapy. For me, the birth of the mother is symbolic of a rebirth of the self; it is a biological and mental process of growing and changing one's personality. The changes are both physical and psychological.

With the series, I started experimenting with different visual genres. There are still lifes, body shots and also mother-child images, all trying to capture what is very difficult to capture; a very individual and complex process of becoming a mother.

I started the series because my ideas about becoming a mother were very different from the reality of becoming a mother.

I wondered how it could be possible that becoming a mother was so different to what I had imagined. From this feeling of contradiction, a work emerged over several years that addresses this process. I had a lot of negative feelings, out of shame because I often overwhelmed myself. In my imagination I idealized mothers, in reality as a mother I reached my limits. The birth itself and breastfeeding were very difficult but also beautiful. It was very ambivalent to have these conflicting feelings that I had experienced and to represent them visually.

The body after birth and the resulting changes have become a topic that has accompanied me constantly from now on.

Working with symbols and metaphors helped to give the viewer multiple levels of interpretation and to point out the multi-layered and complex nature of the process.

Throughout the process of working on this project, I did a very hard emotional work and kept reinventing myself or being reborn as a mother.