Lu d Art Exhibition 2024, The Third Will

The Third Will

I’ve taken over 8,000 photographs of mothers and babies.  From 2014 to 2016, I was a photographer for new mothers and their babies in three hospitals in New York City.  I would take photographs of up to fifteen newborns and their mothers a day.  These families would come from many different racial, cultural and religious backgrounds.  This gave me a great chance to see how different people, under the same situation, reacted differently to the births of their children.

Fundamentally, I came to discover—in my mind—that these mothers became less of a woman and more of a human vessels carrying forward an ancient code of life.  And the babies were not just babies, but separate entities, almost creature-like in their form and function. The interaction between mom and baby was more than mother-love, but a survival instinct from nature.  Breastfeeding is like a pre-programmed behavior of life.  Some natural force, or form, has its own will, secretly passing through these lives.  Like all baby animals, this other will (or force) has the baby find its mother’s breast without anybody telling it where to go.  I saw individual mothers beings stripped down from the sophisticated humans they were to become mere feeding machines; the body of a female became an assembly line of production—in an almost mechanical way—from the womb to the breasts.

In these NYC hospitals, with their multicultural and multiracial populations, I was given a great chance to see individuals as something other than just women.  Women have different definitions in different cultures.  The act of creation stretches the roles and definitions of women and individuals.  I came to see these individuals as the beings that we all are—entities and wills that exist simultaneously in the very same body—a matrix that forms itself and gives birth to its progeny, and in the process shows us another will.  Of course, we have our individual wills, our social and cultural wills, but in that instant of creation, through the female form, we can witness a third will, a natural life force hidden in our DNA.