PHOTO BOOK PRINT - MADRE BY LUNA ANTONIA ARBOLEDA

MADRE

Madre means “mother” in Spanish. In Mexican slang, the word is actually used to accentuate other words or sentences, and make them more powerful.

Ever since my son Lías was born a little over three years ago, I have been trying to grapple with what it means to become a mother.

Growing up with a single mother, I have always had an intimate and significant relationship with the woman who raised and loved me. Being a mother myself now, I have felt overwhelming waves of feelings, emptying me, and making me whole, while trying to find a balance and making sense of it all.

Women are celebrated and admired, even romanticized, for being mothers, but the reality of becoming a mother is quite different. Often times, mothers are expected to go back to who they were before pregnancy, but that is neither physically, nor emotionally possible. Rather we become a new, more complex version of ourselves. Our body and mind changes. It is this process of becoming that I wanted to document.

I reached out to various women in my community, women who I knew to be mothers as well and who have been a part of my own journey. Each woman has a very unique and individual experience of motherhood, but at the same time we are all connected through something so universal, as we love and care for an extension of ourselves, giving up a part of ourselves in order to feel unconditional love. I created an intimate space where each woman could embrace all that she has lived through since becoming a mother—the good, the bad and all that is in-between, that it means to be the woman that she is now.

MADRE is composed of over a hundred nude portraits of 26 different women taken with an analog camera. Each woman is captured in her most natural state, captured in positions and ways that felt the most comfortable to her and without any distractions or opportunities to mask herself. By working with analog photography, the images are staying true in their complexion and capture the unique grain of each woman’s body.

Each image is a shared moment between the woman and photographer, who opened herself up in all her vulnerability and in all her power, to give an intimate view on her experience of becoming a mother. I created this series hoping to be accompanied in my own journey of becoming a mother and to create a community that could allow us to be seen and embraced as a whole.

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I have spent the last year working with the wonderful María Marin de Buen and her team in Mexico City, to put together a collection of these intimate photographs, along with a variety of compelling texts about motherhood. The result is a book entitled MADRE.

It has been a real honor to witness and document the stories of these women and mothers and I have been dreaming of materializing them in a book, an object that you can hold in your hands, that will remind us of this chapter of our lives, and that will hopefully create community and give support to other women and mothers in the future. In order to print the book in Oaxaca, Mexico, I need your help!

Your support will participate in consolidating our women’s community and help foster a female-led and female-centered project that brings attention to the shifts and transformations that women go through after becoming mothers.

Campaign Goal: $8,500 USD / 7,400€

Pre sale of MADRE - $40 USD / 35€

*shipping not included*

Support with $40 USD / 35€ OR MORE - receive a copy of MADRE + postcard print

*shipping not included*