Martha

‘Why don’t you photograph me anymore.’ This is what Martha said to me in response to my camera being focused so often on her sister Alice.

The work began when Martha was 16 years old. A complex and potentially confusing time, when for a brief period you are both a young woman and a child in the same body.

During this period of transition, there is a very short human space when a person can behave free of the weight of societal expectations and norms, before that window closes and we can easily forget how it felt to be ‘untethered’.

Inevitably, the work is also about Martha and myself. I am always there as the photographer, as her step- mother, as a mentor and a friend. However, who I am and where I place myself in the story becomes a more questioning issue as she grows and moves further away from her childhood. The exchange of looks between us, that complex reflected gaze, begins to shift as she tries to define her own sense of self.

In the process of working together in this series, we have journeyed into each other’s psychological landscapes as we have explored what our relationship means. Both our mothers loved us, but were felt absent in our lives. Martha and I mirrored each other’s maternal wounding and this has become our common ground to move forward from.­

And then there is the young woman shaping herself as a social being. Her group of friends is a safeguard, a source of protection as she moves into this new world. But this new family is also a learning ground. She­­ begins to make sense of how she understands the psychological and existential territories of intimacy, love and belonging. And here, too quickly, the idyll becomes infused with all the tensions of adulthood.