She can’t calm down and I’m learning that that’s just her, that’s how it is. I’m learning to be more okay every day with how she operates. Like, she talks a mile a minute, does not take enough time to inhale and breathe. I think it’s the perfect word to describe my work as a whole. JS: I love that you noticed the freneticness of it. Can you talk about the different styles you’re employing here, and how they’re working together?
Other images in the series appear to be made in a more deliberate, considered way-posed for the camera. Some of the portraits of your mother have a frenetic feeling these have a candid, snapshot effect, often using hard flash. LLHW: This series really has a palpable sense of energy around it, and I think that has a lot to do with your style. Mom helping me cut my hair during rehabilitation, Queens, NY, 2018 © Joey Solomon It’s my foundation in my long term work of creating representations around the beauty of being mentally ill. So it’s nice-it’s a project to always go back to. Over the years, she’s really been a huge supporter of what I’m trying to do visually. I like that the project started out from a place of me being estranged with her. But much more, it’s coming from a place of equals, and it’s always going to be evolving. I’m still analyzing her through our interactions and our behaviours, and I think I always will be analyzing her. So I have more of an appreciation of her kindness. You are so strong and I aspire to be like you. I have the same shit, and maybe instead of resenting her, I should be like, Wow, you’re a queen. My work with this series of images is really trying to learn something from how she navigates her own life as a mom with all this shit. Now every time I make portraits with my mother it’s like pure catharsis, and less about me forgiving her and more about becoming her friend, understanding nuances. We were able to communicate, be so much closer and more raw with each other after every session. JS: As I took more photos of her, the photo sessions and the photographs themselves broke so many walls down for us personally.
Mom on Thanksgiving Day, Miami, FL, 2017 © Joey Solomon Knowing that she had all this and knowing that every other member of her family was also severely mentally-afflicted-I thought, Why would you do that to me? Why would you create me? I resented her for having me as a child and becoming a mother. At first, I was not even okay with acknowledging that. Once I became old enough to understand what the medicines meant, I really resented her. It’s four different medications and that’s forever, just to keep my brain and my functioning stable. I have four pill bottles on my desk right now and I need to take those nightly. The portraits with my mother-and of my mother-are my reckoning with the fact that she hereditarily has passed onto me ADHD, manic depressive disorder, acute social anxiety disorder and severe depression. I’m a photographer that first and foremost wants to address mental illness. My core being as a photographer are those images, and that project is very long term. Joey Solomon: That project’s been going on since 2012. Lodoe Laura Haines-Wangda: I wanted to talk about Portraits of my Mother. Mom with One Eye, Perhaps after Schiele, Queens, NY, 2016 © Joey Solomon In this interview for LensCulture, he speaks to Lodoe Laura Haines-Wangda about the conception of this project, the issues at the heart of his work and the intimate process of collaboration. With the series, Solomon extends that raw moment of gazing a bit too long, holding a bit too close, directing us to the inner lives of he and his mother with energetic intensity.
I hear the wind blow as they sway silently, cradling one another for a bit longer than feels natural. The photograph was made with a long exposure, and I imagine the slightest movements in their bodies as they try impossibly to hold completely still for the camera. Their faces are visible only as slivers, mirrored in one another. In one of these monochrome images, his mother and brother are embracing. Indeed, most of the work he makes is executed in black and white. But not all of Joey Solomon’s photographs from the series are this colorful. The colours in this photograph are fantastic and bizarre: the chartreuse towels that hang from the shower rod are reflected in the bathroom vanity, and she blooms through the middle of the frame like a wisteria in her silky purple shirt. She reminds me of a figure in an Egon Schiele sketch. She gazes at us with just one eye visible, her arm tucked into a sharp angle that frames her face.
“I would be a painter if I had more patience,” Joey admits to me from his bedroom in Brooklyn, “but I don’t, and therefore I love photography.” In one of the first images in his ongoing series Portraits of my Mother, he posed her in a bathroom.