What defines womanhood? What do women expect from the world today? What does the world expect from women today? Freelance photographer Ali Smith has been on the hunt to answer these questions for most of her career.
For her first book of photography, Laws of the Bandit Queens, Smith selected 35 iconic women to photograph and requested that each of them give one “life-law.” Her goal was to capture women whose careers had challenged societal norms. As Smith puts it, she was looking to prove that “you could be a woman outside of societal norms and still succeed and do wonderful things.”
Smith brought this same questioning spirit to her next project, Momma Love. Over a twelve year span, Smith captured the stories of all different kinds of mothers, all of whom were questioning traditions and paving their own paths through motherhood.
Early on in the project, Smith decided not to capture these women in the sense of a traditional portrait, but in the raw, chaotic, private moments of motherhood. In one picture, for example, mother Hannah Bright has a spoonful of dinner in one hand and the back of her daughter’s pajama top in the other to stop the toddler from jumping off her chair at the dinner table. The essay accompanying this picture is equally as colorful and universal. Bright discusses the idea of, “wanting your body back” (and your old life) after having a child. She ends her essay with a message relatable to a majority of mothers. “The problem is that there are so many words you can use to express the challenges- exhaustion, loss of control, time management, lack of support, career compromises- but there really aren’t words that adequately express the joys,” she writes. “I just know that I’ve had more laughs- more genuine, joyful belly laughs — since Lizzie’s been born than I’d had in the previous 36 years of my life.”
Bright’s message is exactly what Smith aimed for when creating this book. Of all the diverse paths a woman goes through to get to and during motherhood, there is one commonality and that is, Smith says, “that the depth of love is profound that you can experience as a mother and a lot of it is experienced privately.”
This idea is certainly true for another of the featured mothers, Rashida Taheraly. She is photographed in traditional Muslim garb, playing with her children in a small garden on the roof of her Manhattan apartment. Seeing the photographs of her, one would never know of the struggles Taheraly went through to become the mother she is today. Though she had no issues at first when it came to getting pregnant and delivering healthy babies, the problem was in the gender of her children.
Growing up, Taheraly observed some religious traditions, but upon giving her hand to a traditional Gujarati Muslim man, she married into a family whose traditional values include the importance of giving birth to a boy to carry on the family lineage. When Taheraly’s first born was a girl, the family rejoiced, but Taheraly almost immediately felt the pressures to “try again” for a boy. When her second pregnancy developed another girl, the pressures from her in-laws only escalated. Taheraly loved her daughters deeply, but there was no doubt that the pressure affected her. She says in her essay, “I hated myself for feeling this way and did not let it cause me to turn away from my two girls; I gave my love and attention fully to them.”
An overwhelmed Taheraly suffered a miscarriage during her third pregnancy before finally conceiving and giving birth to a beautiful, healthy boy. She ends her essay with a powerful takeaway: “Our children, no matter who they are, are our true gifts. Each second we get with them, we get to create beauty and peace and joy until they become masters of their own paintings and we become the admirers.” Since the publication of Momma Love, Taheraly has given birth to yet another girl.
When first creating this book, Smith had experienced motherhood with her stepdaughter, but had not yet experienced conceiving a child herself. “Motherhood seemed like a profoundly important secret society that I wanted to understand more fully before I signed up to join,” Smith explains.
About six years into the project, Smith discovered she was pregnant. Taking what she had learned about motherhood from her own mother and after hearing the stories of her mommy friends and the mothers in the book, Smith envisioned her own ideals about how this child would be raised. Luckily, her husband was on board with these ideals, but like all new parents, there were twists in the path they had not anticipated.
“We equally believe that we should be sharing the load 50-50…But even with us on the same page about it, when we first had my son Harper — he’s tethered to me. I’m leaking; I’m tired. Joshua would get up in the middle of the night and make me a sandwich when I had to breastfeed but I still had to breastfeed,” Smith says. “There were privileges because I bonded with my child so much, but they still started to shift the balance in a way we didn’t expect. I would work a lot less; my husband would work a lot more. That was a surprise for us. I had to accept that there were certain things that my partner and I hadn’t planned for, but they were going to be that way anyway, and then I had to figure out how I felt about them. I would express to him in the more tired moments, ‘I’m just sitting here disappearing.’”
Harper is almost 5 now and after a rocky start when it came publishing Momma Love, Smith is now enjoying the sweet joys of both being a mother and having a successful career. She often refers back to the wise words of these mothers in her book and says it has made her “a kinder, more patient (both with my child and with myself), more satisfyed mother, one who still falls short on a daily basis, but who has some perspective on that fact.”
Trends that have come out of this book include Momma Love cocktail parties in which Smith joins a group of “momma friends” who use the book as a catalyst for intimate discussions about some of the harder, more private aspects of motherhood. Smith has also been asked to take family portraits done in the same strong, intimate, vibrancy of those in her book.
When asked to leave her own powerful takeaway for our readers, Smith responded: “Essentially, if the love is there, things are going to be alright. Love and commitment can override a lot of little logistical problems in a familial situation. If that thread is obvious and there and strong, things are probably going to be just fine.”
