Justine Kurland | Aperture Sea Stack, Double Mama. From the series, “Of Woman Born.” Ruby Beach, Washington. 2006.
“After the birth of my son, Casper, in 2004, I began a series of photographs that juxtapose radical repre
(...) sentations of motherhood with idealized views of the American West. The project was titled after Adrienne Rich’s seminal feminist text, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), in which she analyzes the patriarchal construct of motherhood and discusses why it is such a problematic topic for many feminists. While some theorists would prefer to do away with the body altogether, Rich envisions a new rubric in which the libidinal value of ‘tits and ass’ is replaced by the uterus and clitoris, and women are positioned as the arbiters of their own bodies. This series was my attempt to visualize what that shift might look like—women and children wandering in blissful togetherness through the social space of shared landscapes. I made them mostly for myself during my first years with a small baby, because I couldn’t relate to the depictions of motherhood available to me. These photographs opened up space for me to imagine a different way of being a mother.”
- Justine Kurland © Justine Kurland
