Look Mom!: When Photographers and Their Parents Collaborate

“THEY FUCK YOU UP, your mum and dad. / They don’t mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” That’s Philip Larkin’s 1971 “This Be The Verse,” a lament that leaves little room for ambiguity. “Get out as early as you can,” the poet concludes, “and don’t have any kids yourself.” Have art instead, Larkin might have added, in this acrid ars poetica.

Perhaps no medium is in closer dialogue with parenthood than photography, which is, after all, a reproductive technique. (The nucleus of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, 1980, the founding text of modern criticism of photography, was a snapshot of Barthes’s mother—a picture, however, that remains unseen.) From Imogen Cunningham’s soulful 1930s portraits of her work-worn parents to Richard Billingham’s disturbingly charming pictures of his alcoholic father from the 1990s and Latoya Ruby Frazier’s 2001–14 photos of her familial matriarchs defiantly enduring the repercussions of environmental contamination, photographers have often sought to picture the intimacy or estrangement they feel toward their parents—and inevitably, to preserve their presence before it’s too late.

But there is a difference between merely photographing your parents and actively collaborating with them. Leigh Ledare was back at home from the Rhode Island School of Design, sleeping on the floor of his grandparents’ apartment, when he got a call from his mom, Tina, who lived down the hall. Then in her early 50s, Tina had been a ballerina with the Joffrey Ballet, and had even danced for George Balanchine; she had also worked as a model. She quit dancing when she married Ledare’s father in 1973, and then had two kids. Ledare’s brother had tipped him off that, after her divorce, Tina, was now practicing a different kind of dance: She started stripping at the club next door to the apartment building, and meeting men through classified ads.

When Ledare went down the hall to visit her at the agreed-upon time, Tina opened the door buck naked. There was a stranger in the apartment, a young man. The encounter felt like both a declaration and a challenge. Ledare had his camera with him and, at his mother’s invitation, started taking pictures of her that day.

Those images became his first book, Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008). The book intersperses photographs of Tina—many of them out-and-out pornography, showing her imitating salacious poses that she saw in porno magazines, or having sex with younger lovers—with those of Ledare’s grandparents and precocious but troubled brother and, toward the end of the book, the artist’s young wife. (They later divorced, but have collaborated since.) Mixed in are old lists and classified ads Ledare dug out of boxes in his mom’s apartment, and recollections or conversations he typed up for the book, plus stills from a soft-core fetish video shot by Tina and a few friends.

Pretend feels like a cross between a nudie mag and the scrapbook of a particularly fucked-up family. Its candor is at once revelatory and disturbing, in the vein of Larry Clark’s 1971 photobook Tulsa (Ledare lived with Clark before he went to RISD, and cites him as a mentor; a nude self-portrait in Pretend of Ledare holding a revolver is a nod to the cover of Tulsa). A portrait of Tina posing in silky lingerie on a blue bedspread precedes a faded picture of young Tina modeling in Seventeen magazine. A collage of some of her classified ads (“Beautiful, sexy, intelligent, & talented former ballerina & serious artist…”) is followed by a funny picture of Tina, posing nude like an old pinup, in front of a wall of boxes labeled “vintage shoes.” Ledare’s own recollections are seeded throughout, alongside lists, scrawled in a childish hand, of “gifts mom has been showered with” and “other presents Mom has bought me,” “childhood heroes,” “Girls I wanted to do,” “Jobs mom has quit for the following reasons.”

One typescript—tattooed with scribbled-out words and handwritten additions—recounts how, in the summer before seventh grade, “Mom’s started calling me into her room in the afternoon, ‘to talk.’” She’d even hand her son a dollar or two to fold origami for her, but “mostly she’s just lonely and pays me to keep her company.” She talks about her own youth. She compliments his listening, and adds that “dad is awful at that.” One afternoon, Ledare is sitting in a chair in his mother’s bedroom when she gets up and takes a shower. “When the water stops I pretend to be asleep” and he watches her as she comes back into the room and lies down naked on the bed. “I can tell she knows I’m watching her,” he remembers.

The whole series could be considered “an après-coup of that moment,” Ledare said in a phone interview. Pretend could be (and has been) read as a simple variation on the Oedipus complex. But it is much more complicated, and interesting, than that. This is obviously a memory of a boy’s sexual awakening, something that inevitably happens in relation to a mother. But it is also a story of a mother’s performance for her son, a version of what would unfold as Ledare photographed a “crisis my mother is acting out.” (One picture of Tina shows her giving a blowjob while wearing an upside-down tiara.) It is a personal crisis—around this time, Tina was struggling to figure out how to support herself—but also a familial one. “There’s a family feud being enacted,” Ledare said, between his mother and his grandfather, who lives just down the hall. Ledare himself was recruited into the fight, helping his mother sexualize herself in a way that, he knew, disturbed his grandfather, who once had to step down from a job as a minister because of a sexual transgression that Ledare alludes to in the book.

“It’s a coauthored project, in a sense she’s the director of the situation,” Ledare says. “I’m figuring out a way to almost parasite that situation.” The art consists in “that act of non-judgment,” a withholding that Ledare says “nominates the viewer to hold that judgment.” The relationship between Ledare and his mother is queasily ambivalent: a woman’s cracked fantasies of herself are lovingly produced by her son, a professional image-maker, and the ethics of it all are left to us.

Pretend launched a career in which Ledare has probed the permission a photographer gets from a subject—even formalized in a written contract, for one project—and that a subject sometimes wrests back. His feature-length documentary, The Task (2017),records him literally encroaching on the work of a group relations conference, interrupting the work on therapy.Ledare is currently in training to become a psychoanalyst himself, a technique, he says, that prioritizes “allowing us to understand ourselves better as opposed to [being] cured.”

WHAT LEDARE DOES WITH PORNOGRAPHY—short-circuiting it by helping his mother star in her own fantasies—Charlie Engman does with fashion photography. Engman’s book MOM (2020) represents a 12-year collaboration between the photographer and his mother, Kathleen McCain Engman. Like Ledare, Engman had just moved back home after school (he studied Japanese), and his mother was there and available, willing to be photographed. Engman began working professionally in fashion, and “there were these categories of meaning and value that were being imposed on me and imposed on all of us that I was supposed to illustrate,” he says. “As a measure of self-defense almost … I started to try to bring her into editorial projects for fashion,” a way of bringing out, and sending up, the norms of the genre by applying them to an atypical elderly body.

There are not many women in fashion who look like Kathleen—a stern-faced, 74-year-old redhead recognizable to any fan of Collina Strada, where Engman is art director. To photograph her as a model, in the bold outfits and provocative poses that advertising and editorial employ, renders that photographic language distinctly visible, and critiquable.

Collaborating with his mother was safe for Engman. “I could ask things of her that I wasn’t yet comfortable asking of other people,” he said in a video call. The project blends personal and commercial work: all the photographs published in MOM were taken on commission, beginning in 2012 with a Hungarian magazine, when Engman was just 21.

Engman’s pictures, like Ledare’s, are sometimes sexy. In many, Kathleen is in various states of deshabille, perched or splayed on beds and couches, or simply staring at the camera, as nude as Eve. “As her son and as a gay man, she is the most de-sexed thing possible to me,” Engman says. Plus, he adds, the family is used to seeing each other naked. (“I guess we’re kind of Germanic in that way.”) Sexy often blends toward something more matter-of-fact, when her body is contorted or seen from an unflatteringly vulnerable angle, and we see her not as an object of desire, but as a mere fleshy object. In one unforgettable image, Mom with Plum, 2014, a plum rests on the back of Kathleen’s arm, where it meets her naked back, as she bends forward at 90 degrees; the freckles on the plum almost match the freckles on her skin.

Sometimes it seems as if Engman has done up his mother in drag as a kind of woman she is not, clothed in all the fantasies of desire of one of Engman’s celebrity models (Chloë Sevigny, Mariah Carey’s dogs) or in outfits that read recognizably as skater, twink, or John Waters-y caricature. Kathleen has a model’s cool confidence, pulling off pictures in which she should be out of place.But unlike Ledare’s series, which is driven by Tina’s own fantasies, MOM was directed by Engman. “There was a very interesting dom-sub dynamic at play there,” he says. He found his mother submissive to an almost troubling extent, inverting the usual parent-child hierarchy. Kathleen is presented in an aesthetic that clearly belongs to Engman, a decidedly millennial mix of the dense collages and iPhone screenshots of Instagram extravaganza, as well as the lux language of art photography that evokes Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston, Juergen Teller, and of course, Ledare.

A series of disturbing images late in the book makes Engman’s power, as shaper and mis-shaper of his mother’s form, most explicit. One superimposes a shot of Kathleen getting her hair done for a shoot over her body sitting in the studio; at the very bottom of the image, almost hidden, is a rope that ties her hands. The next page shows an iMessage conversation in which Kathleen sends (Today 15:47) a selfie from the dentist’s office, a single gold crown shining next to a white-gloved hand. Turn the page and there’s Kathleen’s made-up face, staring out from a plastic bag filled with water, as if she were a goldfish; her red hair is suspended, and air bubbles stream out of her nose. The white dress shirt she wears is sopping wet, the bag suspended by something outside the frame. Kathleen is at the mercy of the photographer—she can hold her breath for only so long.

Making MOM left Engmanwith a newfound consciousness of the morality of his work. “I think it radicalized me on a political level,” he says. “I was really like, ‘fuck, other people have feelings too.’” Engman continues to work widely as a commercial photographer, recently shooting Charli XCX for British GQ and the viral New York magazine cover of a person with the head of a cat for a series on pets. But his mother remains at the reflective center of his practice—even as he pivots to incorporating AI. He is currently training a model on images of Kathleen, which will present another moral test. A viewer immediately grasps the ethical tension of a photographer shooting a parent, which is a slightly clearer version of the fraught relationship a photographer has with every subject. But what happens when it’s no longer the child who is in control of the parent, but another kind of intelligence entirely?

IF THE PEROSNAL BECOMES POLITICAL in Ledare’s and Engman’s work, the political becomes personal in“Ghostwriter,” an ongoing series Sheida Soleimani began in 2020. The 34-year-old’s parents immigrated from Iran to rural Ohio in 1984, fleeing political persecution. Soleimani’s father is a physician and pro-democracy activist, her mother, a nurse and fellow traveler. Both fled their homeland in dramatic journeys that Soleimani grew up hearing about on the other side of the world. “JD Vance grew up 20 minutes from where we were,” she says, underscoring the contrast. Her parents didn’t speak English well, so she was the only audience for the stories of their lives back home, and the traumas they carried: solitary confinement, perilous escapes over snowy mountains, friends put to death. “They don’t believe in therapy, of course, even though they’re medical professionals,” she says. “I was exposed to some pretty insane shit at a young age.”

Soleimani first resisted telling her family’s story in her work, though she was unafraid of politics: she originally drew attention for her dense collages, which she creates in her studio and stages for the camera, as well as her effigies of women wrongfully executed by the Iranian government. Her visually exuberant “Medium of Exchange” (2016–18) series has a burlesque quality, combining dense archival materials with live models, sometimes nude and often wearing the masks of political figures like Kissinger, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, sometimes slicked with black oil.

The pandemic, however, pushed her to think more about the stories she grew up hearing. She was convinced that her mother would get Covid from her father, who works in a hospital, and that they, and their stories, might be lost. So she called up her parents and proposed a series, and they agreed, on certain conditions. Their faces must be covered, since her father is still politically active under a pseudonym. And the project must be collaborative. Soleimani became their “ghostwriter,” telling stories that belong to her parents, but in her own language. The title of the series has another valence too: Soleimani is making visible ghosts from her parents’ past, specters that have haunted her life as much as theirs.

She introduces her parents in two portraits, Noon-o-namak (bread and salt), 2021,and Khooroos (rooster) named Manoocher, 2021. They sit in three-quarter profile, before a busy backdrop of photographs, tiled likea checkerboard, that showthe ruins of their home in Shiraz, Iran, where many of their stories take place. In both, they wear masks and clutch a bird in one arm. Her mother holds a guinea hen, a species that she had rehabilitated in Shiraz; her father holds a rooster, an allusion to a bird that used to live on their property, where he killed many snakes.

Many of Soleimani’s pictures show birds, which constitute a language of symbols her parents gifted her. As a nurse, Soleimani’s mother focused on rehabilitating birds when she moved to America and could not practice because of her ropy English. The artist herself is a licensed bird rehabilitator; her interview for this piecetook place in the aviary for her crows. Her brood sometimes interrupted her speech. (“The Ravens speak Farsi and they imitate my voice,” she said. “They’re saying Salaam.”)

In Khoy (2021), named for the prison where her mother was held in solitary confinement for more than a year, her mother’s hand sticks out from paper bars, holding an Eastern bluebird that Soleimani rehabilitated and then released with her mother. Soleimani constructs her images as sets, with costumed characters posed among printed-out images and sculptures: in a trompe l’oeil that evokes the forced juxtapositions both of historical processes and artistic practice, Soleimani re-creates realities as complicated, and chaotic, as collage. Here, the bars are made from a cut-up printed image of the actual entrance to the Khoy prison, where her mother was sent for her activism; screen printed in the upper left corner is a Farsi poem in which Soleimani’s mother compares herself to a bird in a cage that no one listens to.

So much in these images is private. The Farsi text is illegible to most viewers, and even those who can read the language would not know the real meaning of the poems. Many images feature Soleimani’s mother’s eerie drawings from her past (a face drawn on a quince, a glyphic fetus on a board). And of course, Soleimani’s parents keep their faces covered.

Working with her parents required the artist to “build a consensual practice.” Photography is always an act of domination. “The lens is a dick that penetrates the world nonconsensually,” the artist likes to tell her students. Dada collage, whose cutting, splicing, gluing, and superimposing fascinates Soleimani, is similarly haunted by violence.

Photography, like family, is stalked by questions of power, of ownership, of autonomy. Photographing one’s parents brings out these familiar, yet still fundamental, ethical quandaries. That is in part because every viewer intuitively understands what is at stake when you see your mom naked. But it is also because, here, we can clearly grasp how photography works in two directions at once. The artists here have taken their parents’ pictures, yes, but given them something in return too. Ledare gave his mother, Tina, access to the airy realms of high art that she briefly inhabited as a young dancer, but from which motherhood took her away. Engman has rendered Kathleen something of a viral icon; as standards of beauty and inclusivity change, she is in demand as a model. And Soleimani has externalized and shared stories that her parents have carried within themselves, “ghostwriting” narratives that they did not have the language, or the freedom, to tell.