Anonymommy

2018-present

Anonymommy is a photographic exploration of motherhood, identity, and the strange disappearance of the self that can accompany caring for children.

In each photograph, a mother and child occupy the frame, but the mother’s face is never visible. She is hidden, obscured, submerged, turned away, covered, or simply swallowed by the landscape around her. She may be holding the child up so that they can be seen, tending to the ordinary work of domestic life, or physically supporting them while the child remains free to simply be a child. The mother is present everywhere, yet somehow nowhere.

I began this series from a place of anger and grief. I felt as though I was pouring every part of myself into my children to the point of becoming invisible. I wondered whether it mattered that I was their mother at all—whether they would have been just as content with any woman who fed them, bathed them, drove them places, wiped their faces, and kept them alive. I was their entire world, and at the same time, I felt interchangeable within it.

Motherhood had not unfolded the way I imagined it would. Becoming a mother to adopted children brought its own particular disorientation. I felt blindsided by how little I understood about how to move forward—to find my place, to know how to mother these fiercely spirited children, and to understand who I was within this new identity.

There are two photographs in which both mother and child are hidden. In these images, anonymity becomes something shared: a strange bond between two people who are simultaneously deeply connected and losing sight of themselves. Their faces disappear, but their bodies remain close.

The anonymity in Anonymommy is therefore not only about the mother becoming unseen. It is about the complicated intimacy of motherhood—the way a mother can be indispensable and invisible at once. She gives her body, her time, her attention, her identity. She holds everything together while slowly disappearing into the scene.

These photographs ask what remains of a woman when so much of her existence is devoted to being someone else's mother.