Mother: The Visible and The Invisible

Malaysia

“The mother can be more than the gods.”
(Chinese proverb)  

I have written in a previous article  about the profound relationship that binds me to my mother, from the time of birth and the health misadventures that I had during adolescence.

Since I started photographing, one of the themes that has always been in my work is the bond between mother and child.

I have repeated several times how, for me, there is no greater and more magical love, and it is one of the feelings that a man will never be able to understand, because it's the mother who carries him on her lap and suffers for his birth, as God wanted in the Biblical tradition as a punishment for Eve's disobedience in the Garden of Eden. But I believe that, after all, it's precisely that suffering in childbirth that binds the two forever, making them unique for all existence.

After all, everything that one most loved and wanted with strength always involves suffering and sacrifice.

 

Malaysia

 Indonesia

But how can you show that powerful and magical link that is inevitably invisible?

Photography works with reality and the visible, but it also has the strange power to make intelligible what the eye does not see, because once written in the image, the viewer has the opportunity to see also what is not present, but there is.

“Whoever wants to grasp the invisible must penetrate into the bowels of the visible,” wrote the painter Max Beckmann.

 

Bolivia

Romania

There are hundreds of poems, images, stories about this infinite love, and it's impossible for me to choose one symbolic photo. But if I had to choose one, my choice would instinctively go to this tender photo of 1953 from Elliott Erwitt.

 

New York, 1953. Elliott Erwitt

And certainly my photographs do not add anything new, but they are my personal research, like a journey backwards in lost time (as Proust would say), towards the source; almost wanting to thin out the darkness with the most dazzling light there is.

 

How much I have made my mother suffer and cry, so when anyone asked me about my early white hair, I reply that I inherited it from my mother, that for the pain of seeing me suffer in the hospital, she had all her hair white at the age of thirty.

In the famous photographic exhibition of 1955 “The Family of Man” the section dedicated to the relationship between parents and children quote a phrase by Euripides: 

            "And shall not loveliness be loved forever?”

Magnificent phrase, and I think it is one of the cornerstones of my whole life: love for beauty in all its forms, which has its highest peak in the mother.

I still remember when I was studying the fundamentals of Islam many years ago, I read one of the most beautiful Abu Hurairah hadith ever:

        “Heaven lies under the mother's feet.”

 

Bangladesh

 

I know very well that reading these lines and seeing the photos will make many of you cry, those who have lost their mothers. It's not my intention to open wounds.

Our mothers are always there, in blood, in skin, in every cell of the body and breath, in every tear and smile. We are the custodians of their lives, as they were for ours, for nine long months. 

For this reason I like to conclude with a sweet African proverb:

“It's better to hear an old woman cough,

than having an empty hut.”

 

Thailand

 Bangladesh

Rohingya

Indonesia

India

Bangladesh

Italy. “My mother”

 “The Family of Man” – Created by Edward Steichen for The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA, 2015)

 

Italian version