Feature image: Arpita Shah, White Sands from Nalini, 2017.
This portfolio showcases four projects by Canada- and Scotland-based photographers, exploring their female family members across generations. Clea Christakos-Gee’s In the Third (2018) meditates on the creativity that runs through her matrilineage, integrating aspects of her grandmother’s art practice and creating poignant titles from her mother’s writing.The photographs were taken at Ramsey Lake in Sudbury where her relationship to these two women and their history is rooted. In the images here, the rock beneath the figure and swimsuit actually bears the long-ago carved initials of her grandmother and grandfather.
In Nalini (2016-2017), Arpita Shah also navigates the connections between herself, her mother, and her grandmother. Nalini is both her grandmother’s name and the Sanskrit word for lotus flower, a symbol of both fertility and rebirth. The three women have lived in India, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. These delicately composed images explore their experiences of migration and loss, revealing how memories and bodies can be intertwined across time and space.
Margaret Mitchell’s 1994 project Family focused on the daily life of her sister Andrea’s three children, who lived in an area of Stirling that scores high on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, a measurement relating to income levels but also a lack of resources and opportunities. Over twenty years later and after her sister’s death, Mitchell photographs her nieces again for In This Place (2016). They now have their own children and have been relocated from one low-income housing estate to another. The project traces the impact of place, both physical and mental, on social inequity and opportunity. Together, these images map the intimate quotidian experiences of these mothers and daughters. In Caesura, Jennifer Long reflects on the shifting experience of being a parent and its uncanny connection to memory. Her daughters’ gestures and inflections transport her back to her own girlhood. As the girls become more and more independent, commonplace moments become fleeting—precious treasures to be preserved.
This collection of images reflects some of the strange pain and beauty of being raised and moving through this world in bodies designated “female.” The artists’ particular focus on where those bodies and minds overlap, and how they engender each other, provides glimpses of another world—beneath, parallel to, or beyond—the omnipresence of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Chick always wanted a little girl. After she had Leah, she knew she didn’t want, or need, any more children. She had her daughter. Chick and Leah got a necklace out of Argos.
One half says “I Love You,” the other half says “To The Moon and Back.” They separated the necklace and each wear half.
Photographing Andrea and her children became about their childhood worlds. About the experience of being a child and all that entails, at that moment in time and in those particular life circumstances.
Clare Samuel is an artist, writer, and film programmer originally from Northern Ireland, now living as a settler in Toronto on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. She serves on the board of directors at Pleasure Dome, is the co-founder of Feminist Photography Network, and teaches at Ryerson and OCAD Universities.
This article is published in issue 37.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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