Difficult loves », Mothers and Daughters, 1995-1999
4 Stories of mothers and daughters.
In Mother and daughter’s photographer Adriana Lestido is searching her own traces in the features she captures, which are drawn for all women: repeated gestures that make only mothers out of us, only daughters, women born of a woman who expels us: love and helplessness.
After two subjects on motherhood at risk –Teenage mothers and Women jailed– Lestido is not afraid of looking at this bond without any distraction. For three years she photographed four mothers at their most intimate activities, women who are walking the path of life together, without any men in their family. Adriana watches mothers with a daughter´s eye. She chooses the place where her questions are valid, and she too wants to know. Why did you drop us from your bosom, Mum? Why are we all alone? Precisely now, when we must live.
Eugenia & Violeta
In Eugenia (28) and Violeta (newly born) she discloses the agony of change, the hard work of a mother, her wakeful nights, the sudden inescapable responsibility of being in charge of the life and upbringing of a daughter and the tacit understanding of the little girl protecting her mother from the very moment she begins to walk.
Mary & Estela
Mary (50) and Estela (30) are in symbiosis. It is hardly possible to tell them apart. Their amusements are the same, they speak the same kind of language, they dress in the same way. Sexuality in their relationship is explicit in some shot or other at whist they have both laughed. But this is the key point for Lestido. The mother´s sexual activity, the use of that place of intimacy where a language of pleasure is spoken which excludes children, is what might help those children create their own differentiated places, separated from a bond that is a nourishing as it is smothering.
Alma & Maura
Alma (60) and Maura (18) get entangled in order not to part company. Their bond is their refuge, and they both rush back to it each time they have separated, since that is the place where by being together they find their identity and shelter.
Marta & Naná
In the last story, Marta (28) and Naná (7), their coming together bridges absence. This mother cannot stop being a daughter, her own mother having disappeared and the bond between them having remained frozen forever in her childhood.
From the text by Marta Dillon
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