Why collaboration matters for family photography…
N O W P L A Y I N G // ‘Courtship (Miguel)’ by Siddhartha Khosla (This Is Us, Original Score)
Recently I was asked to submit a ‘statement of intent’ for the second year of my MFA. It wasn’t my finest score yet and I was pretty surprised, given how much work I had put into writing it. I’m a huge fan of the GFDA ( https://gfda.co ) and so I spent some time re-reading their stuff to pick myself up from the disappointment of it and then set to work putting the feedback into action. If you need a boost, they’re my ‘go to’ instagram page.
In short, the purpose of the document was to set out my intentions for the final year of this degree, and ultimately, mine needed to be clearer. The thing I really needed to do was to stop over complicating my message, and to get right back to my ‘why.’
I didn’t know how to articulate this at first, it is a development that has come through the MFA process, but when I’m taking photographs, collaboration is everything to me. When I’m working with anyone, but in particular with mothers, I want to understand their aspirations for their own family photography. One of my greatest issues is the way that so many mothers don’t really feature in photography with their children, for a whole range of reasons, and I’d like this to change for the better. My aim is to empower and enable them to have some control over the way their image and their relationship with their children is presented. This is a whole range of considerations, but it might be as simple as talking about how physically close I am when I’m working with them, or the colours and tones that they believe best reflect their story. Ultimately, sometimes we just really need someone to listen, rather than to drown us out with their own opinions.
I am hugely driven by working collaboratively, given my lived experience as a mother, and from many discussions with others around me. For such a lot of us, motherhood smashes our identity entirely, or at the very least it makes a pretty big dent in what we thought we knew and what we believed we wanted. It takes a lot to rebuild it to fit our new existence, and it is incredibly hard to put ourselves first, in almost everything. Imagery is a key part of how we create a legacy for our children and I want to offer women the opportunity to have some control over how this is produced.
Over the coming months I’ll be putting my ambitions into action, working in collaboration with mothers to understand what they are looking for in their family photography, and hearing their feelings about how their imagery can best represent their family’s story.
If you’d like to hear more, stick with me. You can also follow me on instagram - @sjburtonphotography where I share things from my ‘back to uni’ experience.