Mothers and Daughters - Madison Schultz
ABOUT THE PROJECT
As the culmination of my individualized major (Photography and Social Justice) I created this body of work that explores the unique relationship between mothers and daughters. Between the spring of 2019 and the spring of 2020, I interviewed and photographed a dozen different mother daughter pairs.
In the final months of this project, the Covid-19 pandemic caused me put an end to my in-person exploration. To honor the work I had already done, I moved the exhibition online and wrote a creative essay about the process.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I believe that there is some elusive, transcendent quality to the mother-daughter relationship. I’ve felt it viscerally in my own relationship with my mother, and I’ve felt its ripples from my mom’s relationship with my grandmother. I’ve caught glimpses of its edges in my observations of other mothers and daughters.
Through this project, I took on the task of learning more about this quality and capturing it through photographs. My work explores questions like “What makes the mother-daughter relationship unique from other relationships?” and “What are common themes or truths within mother-daughter relationships that transcend differences in circumstance?” The purpose of this work is to deepen and widen these questions through the process, rather than to answer them by the culmination. The work looks at the universal, but at the particular as well, exploring how individual backgrounds and circumstances play out within one specific human relationship.
I found that my ability to investigate was somewhat confounded by the pervasive cultural concept of family photographs and the subject’s idea of what the end result might look like. Consequently, a sub-question emerged: What do people believe that the mother daughter relationship should look like, and how do they portray that to the lens? To get someone to let their guard down is a tricky task, but I found that intimate and candid moments did eventually emerge from more postured and constructed realities. Through conversational interviews, I was able to build rapport with subjects and get closer to the heart of the mystery of the mother-daughter relationship.
