Self portraits from Elinor Carucci’s series, Mother.

“Motherhood revealed the best and the worst in me. I was filled with so many emotions. Joy and wonder, love and happiness coexisted with sadness, anger, exhaustion, and anxiety, as well as a sense of mourning for the body I would never have again, the woman I would never be again.

I felt and saw so much in those first months– the beauty and ugliness, the tears and laughter, the extremes you come to know when you’re a new parent. I tried somehow to deal with it all through my camera, hoping to portray the complexity of motherhood as honestly as I could.

I have always endeavored to convey a full range of emotion in my work, to take our little stories and turn them into one epic human tale. I am both comforted and relieved to discover how universal my story is, and I thank the many mothers I have met for their honesty and willingness to share. What they have told me has freed me to portray the complexity of the relationship between mother and child, as so much of what I have experienced has been experienced by other women as well.”

Elinor Carucci is a photographer who lives and works in NYC. In her photographs Carucci seeks what she calls ’emotional truth,’ where authenticity and theatricality can coexist. She has published three monographs to date; Closer, Dairy of a Dancer, and Mother.