"How Come Our Universe Looks Like the Top of A Baby's Head?"
"How Come Our Universe Looks Like the Top of A Baby's Head?"
A Conversation with Karni Arieli
I didn’t *intend* to wait six months between interviews but the final third of 2023 has been a time of transition and low-grade chaos over here. Nothing too dramatic but throw a new childcare situation and a few viruses at even the most well-oiled domestic machine and suddenly it’s a day-to-day fight for survival. There are seasons in parenting and for me this has been a season of outside voices (so many) crowding out the inside ones.
I’m always amazed at what writers and other artists can make of those seasons and chaotic obligations, and I’ve spent the last two years admiring the photos curated as part of the Eye Mama Project. The project is the brainchild of the photographer/filmmaker Karni Arieli, who first collected the photos on Instagram and has now published a gorgeous book called Eye Mama: Poetic Truths of Home and Motherhood.
The book (which, incidentally, would make a great gift) offers a window into the beauty and intensity of home and care. It features images of motherhood that are, as Karni puts it, neither horror show nor momfluencer. Talking to Karni and looking through the book prompted me to revisit my own (admittedly far less artful) 2020 photographic archive, replete with Cosmic Kids Yoga and baking; bike riding and Zoom school. I had 25% fewer children then and I feel homesick for those three rounder faces and the speech impediments and the way they weren’t as self-conscious when I took their picture. With enough time, chaos and exasperation transform into nostalgia. I’m writing this on a three-day retreat I’m throwing myself in NYC and I desperately want to bring that truth I am always forgetting back home, especially as we head into the wilds of winter break.
I do have some great interviews planned for 2024 — old faves and treasured voices and rising stars alike — so stay tuned and stay strong through whatever seasons are coming your way. Read on for my conversation with Karni Arieli on turning frustration into collective art, the implications of AI for photography, and what she means by the “Mama Gaze.”
You’ve been working as a photographer and filmmaker for years. Your older son is 17 and your younger son is nine. How has it been to do that kind of creative work while raising kids?
I had my first when I was 30. So let's say I worked as a directing duo with [my partner] Saul and in my artist career for like at least 10 years before I had kids. I didn't want to let it go. But I think motherhood was- you showed up in this way where it was so all-consuming. And not only did I not sleep for quite a few years, I felt like I lost my power for a while because I was very conflicted with, ‘Am I a bad mom if I want to go to work? Am I a bad worker if I want to be at home as a mom? When do I do what? How do I survive financially? How do I keep myself while giving everything to my kids and my work?’ All these questions and no answers because there's no one telling you how to do it. And society sure as hell isn't helping you. We have no village, no family close by. My partner really wants to help but also needs to make money. And so there was a lot of conflicts for me, and it was tricky. And often I would pretend I was a guy when I would show up to shoot a commercial or something or a music video, which is something we do as well. I would just say I'm putting my man hat on, which after COVID, I didn't want to wear that man hat anymore, but I would be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can stay late. Yeah. I'm cool.’ And I would never mention my kids, and I would never talk about anything that was mumsy or whatever. So really you're hiding half your identity, right? So then you're not really showing up authentically.
And so was Eye Mama a way to integrate those two?
I think it was this long waiting thing of this undercurrent where I never really talked about it that much, but I felt frustrated all the time by feeling tormented and guilty no matter what I did and feeling like Saul had a better setup. He would cook way more than me and show up a lot for the kids but I still felt he had it easier because he wouldn't have to show up with leaking boobs or with a postnatal weight or be up all night or the kids begging for him as much as they begged for me at night. And just this DNA guilt of what we've been taught, and also this great love for my kids where if I wasn't making really meaningful work, and obviously work isn't always meaningful, feeling tormented that I’m actually not there with them and then you're like, ‘Should I just throw it all in the bin? Should I just be with them?’
Right. I'm giving this up for that?
Yeah, like, what's the point?’ So I think it's the curse of being mothers who are thinkers and feelers. It's like we connect to so many other moms and women and our kids. And I love our sense of empathy, but it's also a curse in the sense that you can feel too much, you can think too much. And actually, it's a bit of a dead end, except that it wasn't, you know, I did make Eye Mama, and I do have two amazing kids who really inspired the project. And my kid even wrote the times of day in the book because it's divided by times.
Oh, I loved that detail.
He feels like he's got some ownership of it, and my eldest took some portraits of me. So I tried to include them in the process. And mainly, I tried to show them how you have to fail and get up again. I think that when I was really flawed from the project and thought I wouldn't be able to finish it or get to closure with a book or something, I would look at my kids and be like, ‘All of this effort, all of this sacrifice, and I've still failed.’ So in some ways, they drove me harder than the project because I had to show up to say, ‘Hey, you can be knocked down, but what you really need to learn is that if you have this long vision for something, you should keep fighting.’ And I thought, if I'm going to show them that I give up now, and they've seen me crying or upset or whatever, then I am really teaching them not a great lesson in life. But it's always a juggle. Looking back, I think it was worth it because the books are there and we've done all these book launches and talks and articles, and it's changed a lot of women's lives who are photographers who could showcase their work.
And Eye Mama was a pandemic project, right?
Yes, it was this weird, interesting time where I was scared and out of my comfort zone, without any family as a freelance artist, feeling quite sick at the beginning of the pandemic and then lifting my camera to document my kids, which is what I do usually when I recover. It's like how I deal with the world, I guess. And then as I was taking pictures of them in lockdown, realizing that everyone I followed on Instagram – which is like mainly the female gaze, because that's what interests me – were doing the same, right? So I'm getting these kind of peepholes into the homes. When everyone turned their lenses introspectively, I saw all these parallel stories told in different countries, in different ways, in different eyes and lenses, but they were all the story of motherhood. And it was all happening behind these closed doors. So I just thought, ‘Maybe I'll start collecting it on Instagram and see what happens.’
So was it just you DMing people on Instagram and being like, ‘Hey.’
Absolutely. Because there's no other way. I'm a trained filmmaker, photographer. I was never a curator, but I knew I could do it. It felt like a calling. I knew what images needed to be seen because I was on that junction that was particular and specific of a mother and photographer who was in lockdown looking at all these other mother-photographers and had this idea. And it so happened that my kid just happened to be at this age where he could just be a little bit more self-entertained. Five is that age where they're just about to reach school age. It's not ideal, but it's not the hardest.
Right, they sometimes play by themselves.
Yeah, or TV.
Screens are the patron saints of so much mom art.
Yeah, and so it just happened that everything coincided. There was this perfect storm, and I was like, ‘I'm meant to do this. I know how to do it. I don't have any idea how to go about it, but I'm just going to start asking these women for images and tagging them.’ And so I knew Elinor Carucci, and I knew a few other photographers. I asked them so I had like 10 images. And then I would say to them, ‘If you know any other women, refer them to me.’ So it's this endless detective work, scrolling the feed, seeing what I like, what I don't like, DMing some women. And then slowly, women started coming into me so much so that I think for now, the #EyeMama project, I think, has more than 60,000 submissions from 60 countries and growing every day. Now we have 22,000 followers on Instagram and we have the book that has 228 photographers selected in the open call that I did based on that project. But getting it out there- these people don't find you, you have to find them. You're like, ‘Are you aware of my project? Have you seen this?’ So there's a lot of knocking on doors.
It’s hard to do that. Self-promotion is tough.
It's a nightmare. I didn't even know what I was promoting. At first, it was just this Instagram platform showcasing motherhood, right? But on Mother's Day, National Geographic thought it would be a good idea to showcase but it was a very short turnaround, very stressed. And it was just after somebody else had let me down, and I was desperate to get something out. National Geographic, Vogue, and a few others showcased it, and it became a bit of a stronger, more well-known platform. And that's when I started trying to make the book. And nobody wanted to make the book either. So even though you've got this really amazing platform with hundreds of images on, people can't see the transition, or they want you to wait three years so they can check the submission because that's how long the waiting list is. Or they want you to give half the money, which I didn't have. So in the end, a photographer who's really well-known actually connected me to his publication, and I pitched it to them, and they took it on board, which is teNeues, the company that published it in the end.
And were all of the images in the book from Instagram, the ones you had collected during the pandemic?
I think there were more because also what I did is I bought Elinor Carucci and some women who I knew who were empowered women in photography. I bought them in to help me with a long list. I wanted to make sure that other women with other eyes and hearts would have a look and also to just bring in more woman power, not to be all about ego like, ‘I curated this.’ More like saying, ‘This is a curation of the best, the most interesting, and most secretive and unseen photography out there on motherhood at this point in time, in 2021, '22.’ So it's a point in history. And what I'm hoping is that somebody in 1,000 years from now will pick up the book and be like, ‘Oh, that's what motherhood looked like in lockdown,’ which we can't do on World War II now or on any other events previously.
I want to talk to you about that, actually, because I’ve been thinking about World War II lately and how photography from that time is considered evidence of what happened, a reflection of truth. But right now it seems there’s a crisis of the visual. We’re just completely inundated with photos and videos of war and suffering and nobody believes anything unless it confirms their own biases. Not to mention the challenge of AI when it comes to images.
The topic of the Photo Vogue Festival this year, which I was at, in Milan, was what makes us human and AI in the medium of photography. And there was a guy there who opened the festival who's an expert. And he really freaked me out because what he was basically saying is what you're saying but with a resolution that if we can't trust images, there can be no democracy anymore because people need to trust what they're seeing and hearing, to trust their governments, to trust the democracy. If it's not happening, then you get dictatorships and far right-wing bodies rising, which I can already see happening if you look at South America and Holland and just generally God knows with America, let's not get into specifics, but if you know who gets you know where again. I saw amazing works at this festival with AI that connects people to their memories, to the history of the plants and nature, to their indigenous backgrounds. There's a lot of great stuff that can be done with it, but 90% of what AI is used for, first of all, is as usual, pornography.
Right, naturally.
And evil people are going to get their hands on it just like good people are. In the sense of motherhood, I did showcase a picture with AI of motherhood on the Eye Mama platform not long ago by one of the mamas and people on the platform, to be frank, were quite horrified with my selection because they were like- I think they wanted something more soothing, but I was like trying to push my own boundaries and break my own rules. And I was like, ‘Is this because she had three hands, and it was a pregnant mum with a baby?’ What I liked was it spoke of the metaphor of motherhood: you need three hands. And when you're pregnant and you have a small baby on you, that's like mixing up the intensities of these periods of prenatal / postnatal and what it means to be a mother in a way that you get to think about it, and it throws you and shocks you. But personally, I'm a big lover of photography, and a lot of people don't consider AI photography if you've got prompts that are verbal and you're not using your eye. But I think if it's used cleverly, it can be considered art, just like anything else. But it's a tool. It's just a tool. The problem is that it can undermine the feeling of truth. I think with motherhood sharing, in a way, it feels like a place where the truth might still exist. Like I don't see women manufacturing insane scenarios at home because it's already insane.
You don't have to create it.
The fantasy's already in the home life. And I think that's what I love about Eye Mama is that it's this fantastical, close-up look at the beauty of every day and the chaos and the beauty within the chaos. So like AI is not going to really, in my mind, touch motherhood, but it will for sure touch humanity.
What were your criteria for choosing the photos? What were you looking for?
First of all, it had to be by professional photographers And that was self-described. So it's women who describe themselves as professional photographers. I didn't check that.
Right, I think that’s really important when you’re working with mothers, who may not have the traditional markers of professionalism. I see that with writing, where people have a hard time calling themselves a writer if they don’t have those markers or if they’re not published regularly or they’re self-published.
Right, I thought it was fair to level the playing field and say anyone who feels they're a professional photographer can join. And the term “mama” was also very broad, including anyone who'd been through miscarriage or abortion or adoption, fostering, same-sex, single parent, all of the narratives, and also the diversity, the countries, and the race and the ethnicities. As open and as broad as I could make it. But within that, I really needed photography that moved me, that made me either think or feel or both, and that was really striking visually. Because there's a lot of the humdrum of motherhood and there's a lot of the fake motherhood, and neither of those was the narrative that I was interested in. What I was interested in was women looking closely at their motherhood and making something of it with their point of view and their specific take as a self-portrait, telling me something beyond the documentary photograph. And some of them were documentary photographers, but some of them were art photographers. But in the self-portraiture, I was looking for either a really nice light or a really nice perspective that I've never seen or something intimate or something raw or hard or just images that would be in a book that I was kind of making for myself. Just new perspectives on what I knew so well.
The book as a whole is this incredible witness to the often unseen moments of motherhood. So many of the photos brought back memories for me of those times as a mother where you’re like, ‘oh my god, how is this a thing that people do?’ and then you just keep doing it. Like nursing a baby on the toilet or nursing a baby while another kid climbs on your back and a third is throwing a tantrum. Or those early morning moments in bed with a baby that’s finally sleeping and the light is hitting them just right. You know, just to name a few from my personal, mostly uncaptured archive.
And I think that there's so much beauty. There's one shot of a head with a swirl on a baby’s head. Most mums know that swirl but when you separate it and isolate it, suddenly it looks like the Milky Way, and you're like, ‘How come our universe looks like the top of a baby's head?’ So I think philosophical thoughts come to you when you look closely at stuff. Like mothers being taken over – their bodies being taken over by babies, drawn on, or climbed on. Or women not existing, being covered by things. There were also strands of connection between the narratives: kids on their moms; drawing on their moms; foods; beds, lack of sleep; light and dark; shadows on the wall because we were all home a lot in lockdown. So it's kind of looking for that beauty, but also the undercurrent of a dark, menacing, I guess, existence of what it means to care for someone, which is often petrifying and quite hard. And often women don't talk about that side, right? So it needed to be a little bit revealing in the authenticity, as well, in the undercurrent, so that we were actually bringing change because otherwise, you're just seeing what you've seen before.
What kind of change would you hope to effect? What's your wildest dream for what these photos can do?
I think there's this chain of visibility. We're a network, like a spider web of mother photographer eyes and hearts networked all over the world. And they're funneled into this channel, but also they showcase the channel. And then there's a visibility chain going onwards into articles. I want to make a documentary now and maybe an archive online and more books or whatever. The platform could continue if we get sponsorship and things like that. When the “Mama Gaze,” as I call it now—which is mothers looking at their own motherhood or women looking at motherhood closely—when our images are infused with that as much as they're infused with the male gaze- I gave an example at Photo Vogue Festival. H&M wouldn't dare have an ad out now that wouldn't have three colors and three body types. So when the same happens for motherhood, that's the win because when it's on billboards and on bus stops and in films and theater and dance and on t-shirts and in your phone and on your cinema screen, and in the commercial breaks and on TV and in series and blah, blah, blah, when it's everywhere, you can't ignore it. It's an unignorable topic.
Right, that’s an interesting comparison.
At the moment, it's nowhere. So people just whistle and go off to work and they're like, ‘Oh, somebody's looking after the kids. It's happening somehow.’ My job and what I feel our job is as artists and photographers and my job as a curator is to show as much of this narrative as possible that's meaningful, powerful, but also has beauty so that people are drawn to it. So they want to look, so they don't look away. Where I had to balance the book and the project is it can't be a horror show because there's plenty to show for motherhood that could be a horror show. And it can't be like a beauty pageant. It's got to be this duality that we feel every day of what I call the light and dark, right? The mama gaze is the light and dark of care and parenting. And so I think when the world is infused with that, rather than influencers and Pampers commercials, and not like Mother Teresa or, whatever, Mary, then we can start talking about real issues. And women are already talking about real issues, but I think it should come together because there's these subversive books like Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, like Matrescence by Lucy Jones in the UK. That's a great book I've just read and we've become friends. So there's this cross-section of all these undercurrents coming up post-pandemic of mothers saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. We have something to say and show. And it's not what you'd think.’
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