Photos showing what motherhood is really like

Photos showing what motherhood is really like Sophie Ebrard For International Women’s Day, Deborah Nicholls-Lee explores the work of photographers who look beyond clichés, revealing the physical and psychological changes after giving birth. She says: “People don’t have any self-consciousness when they are photographed at that point because they are so overwhelmed with emotion an amazing authentic self comes across.” In 2016, WaterAid invited Lewis to repeat the project in Malawi, where some of the women faced a six-hour walk home from the birthing centre. “My body had been my body for all these years, and to witness it change beyond my control was disturbing,” says French documentary portrait photographer Sophie Ebrard in the confessional audio diary which formed part of her 2019 Amsterdam exhibition, I didn’t want to be a mum. She says: “I wanted the project to be as complex as the experience of becoming a mother can be – to raise questions, to open up these contradictions about the experience.” Ana Casas Broda Videogame, 2009, from Kinderwunsch, 2006-12 Martin, the elder of her two sons, came up with many of the ideas for the shoots, such as wrapping his mother up like an Egyptian mummy. She says: “In some of these images, a painful feeling would also come to the surface, and led me to understand difficult emotions from my own childhood.” Ana Casas Broda Ana Playroom V, 2010, from Kinderwunsch, 2006-12 Pain and imperfection in childhood, as seen through the eyes of the mother, is a prominent theme in the work of American photographer Sally Mann, who trained her lens on her three young children in the controversial photography book Immediate Family.