LisaThis photograph of Lisa and her three-year-old daughter Maria was the product of the "no planning" approach I was considering in my last post. An hour before the end of the program day I asked Lisa if I could take pictures of her and Maria at Julie's after school. Lisa, who is always talkative and a good sport, agreed. She was one of the moms who had been most excited about my project from the beginning. She was also the first woman who volunteered to be recorded when I was gathering testimonies for the Annual Dinner Video.

I wanted to take photographs of Lisa and Maria in the sun room on the third floor since it has such wonderful light, especially in the late afternoon. However, I had not reserved the room and meetings were going on there. We ended up taking most of the photographs in the bathroom on the second floor, which is on the same side of the building as the third floor sun room. I think people who passed by thought I was a little crazy with my big camera and strange-looking accessories cluttered around the toilet.

Lisa and Maria have a very special relationship. They are such good friends. While I have seen mothers and daughters who were close, and have experienced that myself with my mother, I think their situation is unique because Maria is still so young. After I printed contact sheets of all the negatives of Lisa and Maria, I knew almost immediately that this image was the one - the one I would choose as the best and the one I would be most happy to give to Lisa this morning.

Last night I was struck by the fact that in pursuing a project about motherhood I have chosen to work the most with two images in which the mothers' faces are hardly visible. The viewer can hardly see the mothers because they are turned almost completely toward their children. I think sometimes my visual sensibility is in tune with things, particularly in the realm of relationships, that my brain cannot quite articulate yet. That is what Lisa, my first large format teacher, once said, and I realized to that what I first considered to be a paradox made sense. In both images, which are about the relationship between mother and child, the mother is made less and the child more, first by the mother herself and then by me as I aimed to truthfully represent them.