My Mother’s Eyes
My greatest muse is my mother’s love. And her mother’s love. And my dad’s mother’s love. And the love of my aunts, and all of the other women who shaped the world I grow up in.
Their faith and resilience. The eternal love that loves regardless of how hard and scary it might get. But how do I pay tribute to that without glamorizing the suffering that comes with that?
& how does one even begin to say “I’m sorry.” Sorry for the pain that fathers and sons cause and sorry for the ways women are so often asked to carry what the rest of us cannot.
As I try to take the reins over my creativity and build myself up, I realize that the way I see the world didn’t start with me.
These first few images from an ongoing project - palomas negras - inevitably ended up being about my mom.
My mother built an entire aesthetic and moral world without ever calling it art. She simply lived it. She taught me that beauty could exist in ordinary things and now everything I photograph is, in some way, an attempt to find my way back to that world.
Sometimes I tell myself that if I work hard enough, build enough, create enough, maybe one day I will be able to repay her. But the truth is that the work itself often takes me farther away, and that distance breaks her heart.
Maybe the only thing I can do is keep making pictures that remind me where I learned how to see and how to love.
And maybe I should call my mom.