Of Woman Born (2005-2007)

In 2004, when my son Casper was born, I began a series of photographs of mothers and babies. I staged them grouped naked in natural settings, as though bound by the brute endurance of a shared animal existence. I wanted to test the essentialist theory of “mother earth,” to follow it to the full extent of my imagination. While it’s clear that the earth is nobody’s mother, I wondered how our relationship with the natural world has been influ- enced by gendered expectations. Would we still be raping, pillaging, and extracting if we considered the earth a father instead? Or would she be revered the way the heavenly father is?

These photographs embed women and their children in the landscape, nestled among the pines and draped on craggy beaches, challenging the notion of motherhood as a compulsory, even sacrificial institution that binds women to a life of domestic subservience. I titled this series Of Woman Born, borrowing from Adrienne Rich and her foundational 1976 text of the same name. In the spirit of Rich’s consideration of motherhood as a con- tested ground and site of socially condoned subjugation, these women renounce the heteronormative family, exchanging the suburban status quo for the chance to claim their own destinies in the surreal austerity of the American wilds.