Joy
Christiansen Erb

Portrait of a Mother (2014-2015)

I am a mother, a wife, an artist and an educator. I am the “fixer” in the family as my five-year-old son says. I manage our family household while trying to maintain some kind of balance within my professional life. I am a busy and tired working mom.

This photographic series documents my life, my family and the parent-child relationship in a way that is not meant to be sentimental, but to be poetically descriptive and true in communicating the emotions that I have experienced in this complex role.

My children’s lives have been recorded since birth. I create portraits of them to better understand our individual relationships and to document their physical and emotional growth over time. I photograph them to be close to them and to make physical documents of the beauty I see in them everyday. This photographic evidence act as “markers” of my love for them, reference universal symbols of childhood and record the physical scars and stains of our everyday life allowing the viewer a glimpse in to the private moments of our family.