Forgoing shots of their stomachs and instead focusing on the eyes, Vaida Markeviciute-Razmislavice wanted to document the impact of motherhood.
The photographer created project Becoming Mother, in which she captured 33 women before and after childbirth.
Usually, you’d probably expect that these images would show the transformation to the body, but the Lithuanian (a mum herself) wanted to explore the women’s ‘gaze’.
It’s somewhat similar to Marcos Alberti’s The O Project in that the images are simply headshots, showing the impact using just their faces.
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No matter how much we may say our friends ‘haven’t changed’ since having their kids, that’s not totally true. They may keep bits of that personality we knew, but in becoming a parent, they’ve changed physically, mentally and importantly in this case, emotionally.
And Markeviciute-Razmislavice homed in on the eyes as the pathway to the mums’ thoughts and feelings in her art.
Speaking to My Modern Met she explained how she wanted to ‘highlight women’s gaze’ by ‘taking away everything that would interfere with it’ – such as a baby bump.
While the side-by-side images of the women may seem subtle, if you look deeply, it’s as though each woman’s experience of becoming a mum is in her eyes.
“Behind every portrait,” Markeviciute-Razmislavice explains, “there is a woman’s story, her unique journey, her transformation.”
Women were photographed while pregnant with their first-born and then again within the first three months of giving birth. The shoots were ‘very private’, with very limited crew and no more than two models in the room at a time.
There was a slight hiccup though, in that the lighting for the second images had ‘different lighting’ due to the studio needing to be accessible for the women to bring their babies in prams.
Question the photographer asked the women
During the shoots, Markeviciute-Razmislavice asked just one question: “What motherhood meant to them.”
She explained that during the first shoot, it was ‘all theory’ but in the second, ‘most of them couldn’t help smiling’.
“They openly shared about the new experience they were having, which they couldn’t l have imagined,” the photographer recalled. “Women talked about the new challenges and this inner power they discovered, that no matter how impossible it may look at first, you just do it, sometimes even not realising it was possible at first.”
She explained how ‘so many different emotions’ were flowing and that she could see such a difference in the women.
“There was something intangible, very subtle and at the same time, deep, and evident. It is indeed rather hard for me to describe the changes the whole team witnessed,” she said. “Some people see them, some don’t. It is vaguely possible to describe in detail the invisible behind the Becoming Mother portraits.”
What Markeviciute-Razmislavice noticed
The biggest changes the photographer said she saw between the women being pregnant and giving birth were: “Different gaze, completely different energy, maturity.”
She added that ‘all of these details’ of what the women had experienced are ‘hidden in the portraits’.
“And this also translates into a very important message: there are things one cannot see with the naked eye, the simplest form can hide the complex content,” the Becoming Mother creator said.
“Behind every portrait, there is a woman’s story, her unique journey, her transformation."
Jess Battison