This document provides a summary and review of the art exhibition "Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity" at the Photographers' Gallery. The exhibition features photographs and videos by eight artists exploring the realities of motherhood through themes of intimacy, childbearing, and the pursuit of parenthood. One featured work documents the artist's difficult journey to parenthood. While most works show the relationship between mother and child realistically and movingly, one transgressive series of a mother engaged in sex seems out of place. The exhibition provides an unsentimental but deeply moving reassessment of maternal iconography.

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Art
Art
Home Truths: Photography,
Motherhood and Identity
Photographers’ Gallery.
Jan 5 2014.
Celeb mums,
endless Instagram
baby pics: we’re
awash with images
of motherhood, but its realities are
seldom expressed. In unflinching
photographs and videos, these
eight artists consider more
nuanced ways of seeing a universal
subject. Common themes emerge,
communicating darkness and
transcendence through watery
immersions, limbs tangled in
embrace or sleep, and bodies
bruised by childbearing or its
pursuit – as in Elina Brotherus’s
yearning meditations on her years
of unsuccessful IVF treatment.
Where there are children, there
is humour, and flashes of levity
quicken the pace. Katie Murray
finds untapped reserves of strength
and grapples with becoming
inextricable from her children
in a video of the artist pounding
a treadmill, carrying first one
and then both her sons.
Fathers also feature, most
affectingly in Fred Hüning’s hugely
personal series documenting his
traumatic journey to parenthood.
The sensationalism of Leigh
Ledare’s transgressive pictures
of his mum engaged in explicit sex
seems at odds with the exhibition’s
commitment to realism, though
the troubled relationship between
mother and son is honestly
portrayed. By contrast, Elinor
Carucci’s studies (pictured) of
mother and child gracefully balance
intimacy and innocence. Playful
and eloquent, unsentimental yet
deeply moving, this is a welcome
reassessment of maternal
iconography. Natasha Polyviou
THEBOTTOMLINESearinglyhonest
snapsfromthefamilyalbum.
Photography,
Motherhood and Loss
Foundling Museum.
Jan 5 2014.
This ‘Home Truths’ sister
show includes Annu
Matthew’s ‘Re-Generation’.
F O L K A R T
Two more family-focused photography shows
Family Politics
JerwoodSpace. Dec8.
The first ever Photoworks
Annual show explores
family relationships
(‘Frowst’ by Joanna
Piotrowska, pictured).
SHOWOFTHEWEEK
Babies on board
‘The First Week’, 2004,
by Elinor Carucci
©ELINORCARUCCI/ANNUPALAKUNNATHUMATTHEW/JOANNAPIOTROWSKA
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