Julia Fullerton-Batten – Mothers and Daughters

Julia Fullerton-Batten gets inspiration for her personal work through her observations of everyday life, as well as her love for art, the cinema, and awareness of current sociological trends. She has also found that, subconsciously, much of the subject matter in her teenager series echoes memories
from her own childhood.

In my latest project, ‘Mothers and Daughters” I portray the complex and sometimes challenging relationship between a mother and her daughter. It is both documentary and biographical in nature, as it also illustrates memories of me and my two sisters’ relationships with our mother, and even our mother’s relationship with her mother.

I chose to work with real mother and daughter pairs in their own environment, rather than with models or actors. I only needed to orchestrate the sitters moderately to show the essence of their emotional bond. They created their own small world together, at the same time, through the staging of the scene, reviving my memories of my own family’s relationships.

As the project grew in shape, form and content, I related to twenty different mother and daughter pairs, with their very varied, sometimes ultra-sensitive relationships, and realised again how much the fragility and vulnerability of the female is exposed fully in the mother-daughter relationship.

Over passage of time it changes significantly. The babe-in-arms is fully dependent on the mother, but at the other end of the age scale, the mother often becomes dependent on her daughter to satisfy her emotional needs.

In the adult relationship the intimacy of the bond is established by the love, struggle and rivalry of a shared lifetime, leading to a mature understanding and acceptance of each other. Between childhood and adulthood, the full spectrum of emotions is played out. My images try to capture all of these very different stages in this extremely special and complicated relationship.

More images from this series and other projects on Julia Fullerton-Batten’s website. You can also follow her updates on juliafullertonbatten.tumblr.com.

Julia was born in Bremen, Germany, her mother German, her father English. She spent her childhood in Germany and in the USA before moving to the UK in 1986. At school-leaving age she decided to enter a career in photography. She has not looked back since. After graduating from the Berkshire College of Art and Design, she assisted for five years, where she learned her craft the hard way and began to develop her own unique photographic style.

Among the photographic projects, Julia has a video section on her website. This one is truly wonderful!

Breast Cancer Care Awareness, 2012 from Julia Fullerton-Batten on Vimeo.