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Back in June I submitted a few photographs, including the one above, for consideration in the Slow Exposures photography show. I told a friend after that I had some complicated feelings over entering. I had mostly done it because for the last two years I said I was going to but didn’t, and I was determined not to let a third show pass by. But I had also come to realize that doing shows like that can actually feel rather empty. Don’t get me wrong; I was thrilled to be included in the Lyndon House juried show this past spring, and am very proud of having been selected for it. But the validation that comes from something like that is fleeting, and it doesn’t feel substantial either. Being selected comes down to one person’s opinion, it doesn’t change the way I approach my craft or influence the types of pictures I make. I said in an instagram post a couple of months ago that lately I find myself in this strange place of being entirely comfortable in my work; my direction, my choices, the images themselves. And that’s true. I feel a peace right now about what I make that is pretty unshakable. It’s not that I think what I make is good by any certain standard, it’s that I’m making what I want to make. I hope people like it, but if they don’t that’s ok. It’s mine, and to me that’s what matters most. So when the SlowE selections were announced and I wasn’t on the list I expected to feel some relief. And I did. But I also felt solidly knocked on my ass by it. It stung in a way that I hadn’t anticipated, and it took me a bit to figure out why. But as I sat with it a while I remembered one of the primary theme’s from Jessica Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood: The conundrum in our culture is that if you are a mother and you need or choose to have a career apart from mothering, then you are looked down upon as neglecting your “primary responsibility”; but if you are a mother that has the luxury of choosing to stay home with your children, then you are without value in a society where that which cannot be monetized is worthless. I began to realize that since making the decision to largely stop taking clients so that I can focus on my own work in what little time I have outside of homeschooling and caregiving and housekeeping, I have struggled to feel like my creative work is worth something. It’s as if, if I’m not selling prints, or making books, or hanging in shows and galleries, then my work has no value. And if my work has no value, then the time spent making it is frivolous; a distraction from my “primary responsibility.” Intellectually I know this is not the Truth. But like most women I have certainly internalized the message. I feel it, deeply, acutely, with every image that I make. Every time I choose to pick up the camera at the expense of spending more time with the kids, or putting up the laundry, or vacuuming up the dog hair yet again, every minute spent doing the thing I need in my soul to do - for myself, for my sanity, for my wholeness - begins to feel like a weight. And it isn't the time cost, it’s the emotional cost that feels so immeasurably high: the guilt that comes in making that choice. It wasn’t that I wanted to get into the show, it was that I needed to get in to justify the expense. I needed to get in to be reimbursed. I suppose that the cost of a photograph is the price of motherhood.
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