Kirsten Lewis is a photographer I greatly admire and a pioneer of the family photojournalism genre. She created this video recently to celebrate Mother’s Day and I must admit, it made me cry. In a good way. Real motherhood is incredibly beautiful. When all those cheesy photoshopped family portraits have been trashed along with other kitsch fashion trends these real moments in time will only become more valuable. Future students of history and sociology will study each detail to gain insight into the time we now live in. Future members of these families will savour the personality of their great-grandparents.
Introducing this video Kirsten writes:
“Celebrating the incredibly demanding, stressful, under-appreciated job that moms have should not be reserved for just one day a year…. We NEED to be more transparent, more honest, more real in terms of how we own motherhood. WHY must we feel the need to hide how hard it really is. It doesn’t mean we love our children any less. It does not mean we are any less a good parent. If we were more open with our struggles, we’d all be there for each other with empathy and compassion. I love when my kid has a full-blown temper tantrum in the middle of aisle 5 at the grocery store and a mom looks up at me and smiles. She knows. She gets it.”