Sarah Buckius

 Mothers go to extraordinary lengths for their children. For “Hidden Mother Photography” in Victorian times, shutter speeds were sometimes up to 30 seconds long so mothers would hide within the picture to hold their children still. Mothers revealed and concealed themselves, in order to create a “permanent document” of their children’s “identities”. This emotional labor is considered “invisible labor” because it is unpaid, undervalued, and often goes unnoticed in our culture. Instead of concealing their identity, I propose that the emotional labor these mothers perform actually REVEALS much about their identity–their ingenuity, inventiveness, commitment, and emotional labor and strength. My “moving portrait of emotional labor” pictures the process of photographic portraiture. I reenact their labor, along with enacting my own, as I pay tribute to the unpaid “hidden” labor of mothers that is performed universally, continually, unfailingly, throughout the world, thus monumentalizing it as collective and “visible”.



Comments

  1. AldobrantiMay 1, 2023 at 2:08 PM

    Carers UK estimates that carers save the economy £132 billion per year. Rewarding this should form part of any responsible political change

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alice BrookesMay 9, 2023 at 10:57 AM

      unpaid labour, predominantly women is a monumental problem.

      Delete
  2. Alice BrookesMay 9, 2023 at 11:00 AM

    Very interesting, I'm always annoyed when applying for jobs and you have to explain your career break... as if having children was some sort of holiday.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Arts Research NowMay 18, 2023 at 8:55 AM

    Hi Sarah, would you find it in yourself to select one frame only from this montage?; we're working in a maximum image size for a printed page of 160mm on the longest edge

    ReplyDelete

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