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Baby Blues
Guia Besana
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures” Ralph Waldo Emerson
This project, titled BABY BLUES, explores the emotional and conflicted world women experience during motherhood through a process of staging and symbolic representation of truth.
It might sound like a paradox but I believe that constructing an image from an inner vision can be as honest as recording it from real life. It is another way of showing something others can relate to, respecting a distance but demanding questioning.
Becoming a mother and facing new emotions led me to a different kind of visual narration to describe what is true.
I used a large format camera to stage and recreate images where the subject is a mother in a very specific situation and state of mind seizing the tension between what seems like an obvious circumstance and a deeper implication.
In these images women are like frozen in a different time, far from what is happening around them, like forgotten in a scene.
In an era in which Western women no longer have a “tribe” they belong to, where expectations are high and “burn-out” is a frequently used expression, loneliness increases in mothers’ lives. These representations of female introspection are contemporary portraits resulting from themes such as fear, loss, identity, isolation, fusion and separation from one’s children and fleeting childhood memory that recurs…