Four Generations
These women are inspiring. So different in so many ways, and yet the tie that binds them...family. Four generations of women. Strong, independent, and living in different corners of the globe. You see, Katie moved to Australia where she lives with her 9 month old daughter. Her mother and grandmother both live in different parts of the USA. Family reunions don't happen all that often, and for great-grandmother it might be the last time (it might not too!).
And so I met them all in Bendigo (near Melbourne) when they came to my studio for a family portrait. Katie and her mother wanted to record their connection, their womanly-ness with photos that celebrated the bodies that had carried them through this life, had bore children. Great-grandmother wasn't having a bar of that!! And so we created a mixture of more traditional family portraits, as well as artful breastfeeding and mother/daughter/grandmother shots. And they all wrote letters to each other that we weaved into their photo album. In fact, there's a photo of three of them that I used some of the words in the letters to make an illustrative portrait, showing the love that binds them, now and through future generations.
Taking naked family portraits isn't something I imagined myself doing 5 years ago. My life has turned direction so drastically, and I am honoured to be documenting these moments for these women. Would I convince my own mum to get her kit off for a portrait? Probably not, but you never know! Really it strips us to our very essence, our nature...there's something very innocent and powerful about it. You might agree or disagree. Or like me, you might change your mind as you get older and wiser :)
Lauren x
