| |
 |
| © Elinor Carucci |
| Click photo to see more images. |
Here at American Photo, Mother's Day got us thinking about all the amazing moms who have helped shape our favorite photographers. In this exclusive story, nine of the best pay homage to their mothers in words and pictures.
Elinor Carucci
My mother was the first person I ever photographed. I was 15 when I picked up my father's camera and intuitively took a picture of my mother; I still take pictures of her obsessively. From my mother, my natural point of beginning, my work began to extend to the rest of my family and my surroundings. My mother was and is my first connection to the world; the relationship we have is a very special and ambivalent one. I used to think that the struggles and reactions from my childhood would eventually go away, and my mother's power over me would dissipate, but I realize as I get older that it is basic and stronger than me. Our relationship is changing all the time, and some things never change. Even to this day I still feel like a small child when my mother is upset.
Only in the last few years, I began to see my mother not only as a strong person, but more as a human being with anxieties, weaknesses, and the natural fear of aging. It scares me. "Mom" has to be total security, the "only" security. Power, beauty, and femininity. Perfect. Still today I feel that her power is unlimited and she can do anything for me, she is invincible. But when she prepared me for the world, she showed me the world through her eyes and taught me that there are things that she cannot do for me. My mother put her lipstick on my lips and hoped that it would protect me.
I have experienced every possible feeling toward my mother, from worship to criticism, support to jealousy, happiness to misery, love to hate. My mother is the base for many characteristics in me, and with the years I see more similarities. She has many faces, and is a source of constant discovery. She is a mother, a daughter, a wife, a sexual woman, a strong Amazon, and a little girl. And I find myself switching roles with her. I once thought that to take pictures of my mom would help me overcome the fear of time passing, but the photography only shows me the cruelty of time, and even the pictures of faces without wrinkles do not comfort me.
My photography became a way to send messages between us, raise questions and start conversations. The dialogue can exist only through the pictures. The camera says for me what I do not even dare to think.
Platon
I was sent to L.A. to shoot Dustin Hoffman and I was warned that he was very difficult and hates having his picture taken. When I met him the atmosphere was quite stern. To diffuse it I said, my mother has always been a big fan of yours, Mr. Hoffman. She thinks you're the greatest actor of your generation, and quite cute. With a twinkle in his eye, he said, "Where does she live?" I told him London. He asked, "Can we call her?" So we all huddled around the phone, and when she answered I said, "Mom, there's someone here who would like to say hi." Dustin got on the phone and said, "I want you to know, my dear, you have a secret American admirer, and next time I'm in town I'm taking you to the Ritz for high tea." She asked who it was and when he said it was Dustin Hoffman she absolutely flipped.
That changed the whole dimension of the shoot. After that it was really warm and personable. After the shoot I took him aside and said, "You don't realize this but my father died one month ago. Tomorrow is my mom's birthday, her first birthday without my dad in 40 years. The fact that someone of your status called her up is really going to make her day." I told him, "As a son and as a man I'd like to thank you." And he gave me a hug and left. Without me knowing, the next day his publicist called up and found my mom's address and sent her a HUGE bouquet of white roses with a card that said, "Happy Birthday from your secret American admirer." She kept the card and dried the flowers and invited her friends in to see her roses from Dustin Hoffman. It really helped her get through a very difficult day. I always say, that's people power and we should never underestimate it.
In fact, my mom as a theme comes up in nearly every picture I take. I mention her to the most difficult personalities I meet. Instead of trying to impress people with my professional achievements, I talk about my mother. The most important thing is to level things out, and it brings everyone onto the same level because we all love mum. She's my guiding light. Everything starts with my mum.
Chris Hondros
I grew up hearing tales of war from my mother. Born into a large German farm family in 1936, Inga Hondros had (and has) a phenomenal memory of the conflict that raged around her when she was a child. When I was growing up in the 1970s, Mom transmitted these memories to me: the sounds of American bombers flying over her village; the feelings of hunger when food ran short; the sight of her older brother Herbert in uniform and sent off to fight the Russians, losing half of a hand in battle. (His three-fingered left hand fascinated and scared me as a child decades later when he would come to visit our home in North Carolina.) Mom remembers columns of German troops marching east in tight formations, and returning west bedraggled and doomed after months on the front. Sometimes these troops occupied their farmhouse. Most painful and clear to her was the summer of 1946, age 10, when, in a little-remembered episode in the aftermath of the war, all the ethnic Germans like my mother were forcibly expelled from the eastern fringe of Germany by revenge-minded Polish troops, who then annexed the lands. To this day my mother's home village remains a part of southwestern Poland, now under a new name with too many consonants strung together.
So when I started covering war as a journalist, she understood what was driving me better than many mothers might. When I showed her pictures of Kosovo refugees packed onto rusty trains, she nodded knowingly and related her own similar experiences. Tales of barbarity from Iraq elicit from her not empty platitudes but rather informed observations of how easily stable societies can come unglued, and how quickly the horrific can become commonplace. My mother, like me, sees war as an abomination but not an aberration; she has no expectations that humanity can ever fully escape the call to arms. We will probably always fight wars, but if we do we should know what war means. Fulfilling that mandate is my main mission as a war photographer.
I like this picture of my mother and me, snapped in a happy accident by a friend of my mother's monkeying around with my camera while we had a casual dinner recently at my apartment in New York. I'm not sure precisely what she was telling me here, but I think it was her expressively telling one of the war stories from her youth ("Ach, mein Gott, you vould not believe the fighting vee heard!"), and I like how I'm looking at her, since it captures my true feelings: a deep and unending interest in these tales. They are such a precious resource to me: searing first-person accounts from the greatest war in history from my own mother who was there. I could never have maintained the strength to continue in war photography without my mother's inexhaustible well of understanding and love. I've met and photographed so many saddened souls who have lost their mothers; that I've had mine for as long as I have is my life's greatest blessing.
|
