"What good in a desert is a drop of water? It's not my body that thirsts, it's my heart."
Yerma in the play of that name by Frederico Garcia Lorca
The quote I have used above is from a play that is all about yearning. For the central character it is about yearning for a child which never comes. "Barren... barren, I know I am!" she shouts. I have used this quote here because I came across some work which immediately struck me as profound, intriguing and incredibly interesting - and spoke to me about yearning at a very deep level. Although this post looks at that work it really explores some of the things within in it that struck a chord with me and why, and how that might inform my own future work.
Jamie Diamond has produced two series' of photographs titled "I Promise To Be A Good Mother" and "Mother Love". In these she uses a hyper-realistic doll as as a prop, reenacting scenes and memories from her own childhood, dressed in her own mother's clothes and playing the role of her mother in the images, as well as the future mother she may become. This sort of doll is used usually for a variety of reasons and costs anything from $250 to $10 000. Originally they were designed for comforting alzheimer's patients, people suffering with empty nest syndrome, or miscarriage and the loss of a child. However, there are also a community of artists called Reborners who have these dolls in their lives permanently, living with them as one would with real babies, as far as possible. Jamie Diamond has embedded herself within this community and even set up an online shop making and selling them, and says she has learnt a great deal from these women. The doll she uses in her images is called Annabel.
Jamie Diamond is a truly interesting artist and I will write more fully about her in another post. But for the meantime;
I find this particular work absolutely fascinating for a variety of reasons:
I am really beginning to get to grips with the fact that photography-as-an art is about so very much more than pretty or cleverly manipulated pictures. The type of photograph that draws 'oohs and aahs' is one thing but certain photographic art has the potential, although sometimes subtler and quieter, to be deeply moving, powerful, and thought provoking in the same way a book, play or a film might be, with a narrative. In fact, I think that photography has an advantage over spoken art forms. Theatre in particular can be quite frustrating - music, mis-en-scene, atmosphere can all be set up and then broken suddenly by an actor's failure to be convincing or truthful. A series of photographs whether looked at in a gallery or on the screen at home, or in a book gives the viewer a moment to really reflect upon things within his or herself very privately, either at the time or later in a way that is ongoing. I felt this when I looked at Larry Sultan's work at the beginning of this course and was surprised to be so very moved by his Pictures from Home. Seeing Sharon Boothroyd's work the other night also reminded me of this, and then looking at the work by Jamie Diamond did too.
The photographs are indeed beautiful (as were Sharon's) but as I say, in a quiet and unassuming way. There is none of the flashy trickery and showing off that I am used to seeing on Flickr for instance, some of which is very impressive, it's true. Jamie Diamond's photographs in these two series' are skilfully and expertly taken, beautifully lit with delightful clarity, not even remotely over processed, and with gorgeous depth of field that suits the dreamy quality of them. I aspire to be able to do this. The beauty of the images also contrasts quite dramatically with the subject and content which is searingly painful, I think. Not all her images employ the same aesthetics - some are harshly lit and very vibrant such as the one with models dressed and made up as her mother.
The subject matter is just so up my street it's not true! Aaaah - so exciting!! And for so many reasons:
Years ago shortly before I had my first child I was pregnant with another and miscarried at 16 weeks. Miscarriage is fairly common; 1 in 4 pregnancies are said to end in miscarriage but even so it was devastating for me. I can absolutely see why someone might feel the need for a hyper-realistic doll, although I have to say I have not yet got to grips with what the artistic community of Reborners are doing. However, following my miscarriage, all I wanted was to hold my baby and seeing other people's babies intensified my sense of feeling bereft and heartbroken. I wonder if it might have helped to have some sort of transitional baby to hold at the time, or if that would have caused more problems when the time came to let go of the pretend baby. I can't say, of course as I did not have a pretend baby although I was overjoyed when I got pregnant again.
Transitional toys are I think quite particular to our own society; or perhaps more fairly said, to societies where a child's emotional needs are not always met as fully as they might be as I do believe it is in childhood that the blueprint for our coping mechanisms are formed. And we as a society certainly continue to utilise transitional objects throughout our lives, sometimes allowing those objects to become permanent. Tranquilisers, alcohol, things that we buy to try and feed some unmet need we don't always understand.
Thumb sucking, perhaps an example of the earliest form of transitional satisfaction, is thought to be an emotional form of self-soothing that is desirable by many in our society but not by all.
"When signals are missed, babies stop signaling; they withdraw; they suck their thumbs; they turn away; they try to right the system themselves by not sending out any more signals" (1)
If you think about thumb sucking, and any further self-soothing transitional behaviour as a pattern that stems from unmet needs then you have to question what it is that is missing in our society and perhaps in the community of people who live with these fantasy babies (although, I must reiterate, I have not thought enough about what is going on in this artistic endeavour).
I think it is fascinating that we exist in a society where hyper-realistic dolls are manufactured in the first place; that they might be given to people who are grieving for the loss of a child; and even more extraordinary that there is a community who exist with these dolls in fantasy relationships.
But what really strikes me as profound is that a baby/mother relationship is a reciprocal symbiotic relationship; or at any rate the biological blueprint suggests that it ought to be. The baby feeds and oxytocin flows in both parties. If it weren't that way mothers might find it all too much to bear and babies would die, which of course does happen because our in our society there is much to thwart the whole process. Even in cases that are not extreme, babies across the social spectrum grow up without satisfactory parenting and the cycle continues as they have their own babies and inflict the same lack of 'feeding' on future babies.
"In a more evolutionary infant-caretaker scheme, the infant is a social partner, part of a dyad*. Both mother and infant are interested in being in equilibrium, that is in a stable and contented state. This goal is achieved by a mutual regulation, by reciprocity, and by keeping tabs on each-other." (2)
It is therefore quite challenging to consider what the Reborners might be receiving from their hyper-realistic infants?
However, is it really any weirder than the trend in our society to have faux-communities online rather than genuine communities in the real world for instance because that is what this makes me think about. We in our world do all we can to negate real experience and have instead pale and less fulfilling ones.
We also fill our days with work; pre-industrial communities tend to have a better work/life balance (3). And with material objects rather than living relationships. We over-value things and material matters, as well as the prizes we strive for such as cars, houses and holidays instead of the things that truly matter such as family connections for instance. And we do it all without thinking about it, without questioning it in the main.
The Reborner community for me epitomises some part of our society; and I say this with little value judgement. I'm as addicted to my 'pacifiers' as anyone else is, believe me. In fact I think perhaps their project is about mirroring back to us something about our capacity for avoiding real experience.
The quote above refers to a deep and urgent need in Yerma for a child, she is desperate for a burst of fertility, for growth, to give birth. I have included it as I think the play is a wonderful metaphor for the yearnings many of us have. I certainly do, for a sense of fulfilment. For me the manifestation is a desire to make art, the photography and perhaps writing, the ability to create and express. My fourth child that I yearn for is not an actual child (heaven forbid!!) but the ability to express whatever it is in me that I long to shout about.
I am intrigued by the Reborners. I am reminded of Pinocchio which I have just read with Alfred, my middle child, and wonder if there is something in there worth thinking about. Pinocchio so wants to be a genuine child, to be flesh and blood. To be real.
The other significant part of Jamie Diamond's work is the relationship with her own mother which she re-enacts as well as the very poignant future mother/child relationship she hopes to have. The series titled 'I promise I will be a good mother' would evoke something emotional in most women I should imagine and of course for me that is no different. I suspect most women have difficult and awkward aspects to their relationships with their mothers; but I have to say it is an extremely important part of the work that I did for A4, and in the work I do outside of that - the ongoing work of being a mother myself, understanding who I am, and the lifelong work of exploring my relationship with my own mother and how that has affected me.
Not long after I gave birth for the first time I started reading. I read so much about the nature of motherhood; books that were difficult to understand because I had not studied anthropology or sociology but were nevertheless compelling because that bond between a mother and a baby is so strong, so primordial, and deeply ingrained that it is really, really difficult to understand how it can go wrong. But it does; women suffer from devastating post natal-depression which in the most extreme cases can lead to infanticide; women don't bond fully with their babies; women sometimes leave their children as my own mother did because there are such barriers within them preventing them from fulfilling the role of mother - and in all these cases, we are terrified by the reality of it and sometimes find it impossible to understand. I know if ever I talk about my own mother leaving to friends they are shocked and find it bewildering and at times upsetting. For me the thought of leaving my children is unthinkable - so trying to understand how that could have occurred is something I have spent a lot of time with, one way or another, and it seems I continue to do so through the photographic work I do. In fact, I am certain that the idea of photographing a family is very much to do with that. The family I have chosen to work with is one that has a very different history to mine and exploring some aspects of that mother/daughter relationship is going to be interesting for me.
But back to Jamie Diamond's work:
"Working with the Reborn community has allowed me to explore the grey area between reality and artifice where relationships are constructed with inanimate objects, between human and doll, artist and artwork, uncanny and real," Diamond says in her statement. "I have been engaged with this community now for four years and while working and learning from these women, I’ve become fascinated by the fiction and performance at the core of their practice and the art making that supports their fantasy." ( 4. quote taken from the Huffington Post article below)
The community of Reborners keep their fantasy going indefinitely and it's difficult not to wonder why. It's something that interests me deeply. And reminds me of something I read yesterday where a photographer talked about her whole life being 'the art' - at which point the camera almost becomes an irrelevance. (This post is so long already I shall have to go into that in more detail another time if at all - the sense of nihilism there is just a bit strong for my tastes.)
The pictures themselves are strange - they are are disturbing and almost harrowing for me at times. The one that I find most difficult is one where the 'mother' is in bed with her pretend child. For me this space, the most intimate of spaces, is so tricky so see like this. It takes the photographs I took of me in my bed alone for A4 a very large step further. To think of someone lying there next to a body that is not alive, can never be alive, is only ever pretend and in effect dead is harrowing - and evocative of relationship structures in my childhood, and I imagine in Jamie Diamond's.
I was profoundly moved by these pictures for many reasons. I think the image quality and simplicity is something to aspire towards, as is the deep involvement the photographer has with the community of Reborners. I am fascinated by their practise - it seems surreal and peculiar but they are not really doing anything stranger than what so many others, myself included, do online - whole lives are lived on the internet rather than in reality and this is another big interest of mine. The only difference is that online living is deemed normal because its something that has swept through our culture and been absorbed thoroughly with great speed.
And nor is it any stranger than trying to feed an unmet need with tobacco leaves on fire which is really odd when you stop to think about it, or any of the other things we do to satisfy the deep sense of yearning that people are capable of experiencing, and that Yerma feels when she longs for a child to make her life complete as explored in the quote at the top of this post. I do hope I haven't gone on too long here about these things but I think that all I have discussed will inform the next assignment and future assignments and work because it covers so much that I am interested in.
Yerma quote from Act 2, Scene 2, Yerma by Frederico Garcia Lorca, translated by Peter Luke and first performed at The National Theatre, 19th March, 1986, Methuen.
*Dyad - a dyad as I understand it is the space in which the infant and mother exist. When allowed the mother creates a space in which her infant can be, attached to her in its earliest months but always able to return as the infant grows into a toddler, and when in need of contact and grounding. It is a physical and metaphysical space.
Quotes 1, 2 & 3 are from Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent by Meredith F. Small, Anchor Books, 1999.
Huffington Post article
Jamie Diamond's website
