AMADEA + GERALDINE — by her mom, Geraldine
Making the photos for this story and asking friends for their help made the start of spring feel special. Folding friends into our daily routines at home, the playground, taking the train back to Brooklyn, or going upstate during break. Observing my child observe the world, her excitement being in the woods for the first time running across daffodils and puddles and mud is the same excitement every morning when the J arrives at the subway platform. I want to look at the world more the way she does.
Since becoming a parent, time has a way of moving so slow and so fast, everything feels like yesterday and years ago. I’ve been photographing my family for almost two decades, yet since having my daughter two years ago it’s become a hard practice to keep up with. I’m a single parent, and I often find myself having to choose between holding my camera or holding my child, as she tries to run before she can crawl, or climb onto the pink kitchen counter, or fall down a step cutting her lip, crying blood and snot and tears into my chest.
Making photos has been my way of making chosen family and of beginning to imagine parenthood; it was in photographing my single mother friends and letting them photograph me holding their children that I started to see us. The most intense experience of closeness and love goes through me like a dream, and will we remember any of it. Motherhood very much feels like seeing in close-up, a slightly out of focus close-up most of the time. I think babies begin to realize they are separate from their parent at 6 months, but I still sometimes can’t tell us apart. I’m typing this on my phone as she lays on me unable to fall asleep, her body sinking into mine, both of us half awake, half asleep, I have forgotten anything that came before.
Geraldine is an Argentinean visual artist, casting director and mother. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter Amadea.