Becoming a Mother and Motherless at the Same Time
For photographer Lisa Sorgini, life is divided into two parts: before 2015 and after. Back then, Sorgini was again living in her hometown, on the north coast of New South Wales, and starting a family, but a challenging birth had left her shaken. Then, she got more bad news: Her mother was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and was given just six months to live.
Suddenly, Sorgini was caught between the demands of caring for both a newborn and the woman who raised her. After her mother passed, when her son was just 4 months old, she continued to navigate the grief of losing her only parent alongside motherhood. “When Mom died, it’s like I lost a part of myself,” Sorgini says. She found herself cut off from a lineage of knowledge passed down between women. In those early days, Sorgini desperately wanted to ask her mother for advice; instead, she doomscrolled through Google.
Both the birth and her mother’s illness were a complete loss of control: “ It sounds weird to say, but I think giving birth made me feel close to death like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.” Sorgini picked up her camera to look for answers. “My whole world was turned upside down,” she says. “The camera for me was a way to try to see my experience from another perspective.”
The bond between mother and child became the central subject of her photography. Her new book, In Passing, chronicles those first few years raising her two sons and discovering her new identities — both as mother and motherless.
While the labor and frustrations of motherhood — diapers, dinners, carpools, tantrums — are never far, naturally, her photos radiate with the enchantment of childhood. Each image is hued in rich ochre, burnt sienna, and umber like the light of a late afternoon in August that never seems to end. Shoulders tan, then burn on salty beachside boulders. Safety scissors lop off blond ringlets of hair, carefully collected as a keepsake. As Sorgini guided her two boys through their first few years, she found herself rediscovering her own childhood back when her hometown was still just a shaggy enclave for surfers and hippies on the edge of the continent.
When you’re young, your sense of self is inextricable from your mother; when you’re a mother, your individual needs are often subsumed by caregiving. In this way, there’s always a grief and a loss entangled with motherhood. Sorgini is rarely in frame, appearing only occasionally as a sturdy hip to balance on or a silhouette wrapped in a hug. Instead, the camera’s watchful gaze is a mother’s, slightly wistful but always pulling the viewer closer.
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