Permissions

Title: Permissions
Original title: Permissions
Author: Emma Hardy
ISBN: 978-1-910401-78-1
Publisher: GOST

British photographer Emma Hardy believes that our inner lives are like the weather: there is sunshine, there are raging storms and downpours, and when the morning mist lifts, clarity returns.

“This was taken in 2004. Like most of my family photographs, it came from a chance moment. It was a beautiful midsummer evening, and my son and a friend were helping to wash the car—the hose was spraying, the sun was shining, and everything came together. My camera happened to be loaded and close at hand. I asked them to hold up the cloths so that their faces fell into silhouette, and I took two photographs.”

“This little duck was called Michael. Ducks were an important part of our lives. We raised the ducklings in a cardboard box in the kitchen, set in front of the warm stove. Once they outgrew the box, we moved them into a shed outside. But in summer, the kitchendoor was often left open, and we would regularly find a crowd of fully grown ducks huddled in front of the stove as if they were ducklings again. I love this photograph for my daughter’s casual, utterly unfazed response to Michael’s little dance.”

Like the weather, our inner experience—what we feel, live through, and remember—is never the same twice. This is especially apparent in photographs. To an attentive eye, every photograph remains in a state of revelation, and the viewer’s response to it is always changing.

As the weather changes, repeated viewing continually deepens our understanding of the instant recorded on film. When Emma photographed her children, she was capturing days marked by particular patterns of weather, moments she wanted, as a mother, to remember forever. “Most photographs are made out of love, or longing, or a feeling for the future: I want to have this moment again, so I’ll capture it now,” she explains. “That is the gift photography gives us.”

Twenty years passed between Emma’s first photograph and the publication of the book.

During those years, she photographed her children at home and around the world. She had no overarching plan, preferring to follow her interests and instincts. As she puts it, “Curiosity overcomes fear.”

The cameras she chose were also guided by curiosity. The photographs in Permissions were made with medium-format, instant, 35mm, and 4×5 cameras, using many different kinds of film.

“It is a simple, innocent photograph. My daughter and a friend are catching crayfish in an enclosed pond. You lower a net baited with bacon or leftover cooked chicken into the water, wait a while, then lift it out with the gleaming crayfish clinging to it. They are tipped into a bucket, observed for a time, and eventually returned to the pond. I love the overlap of the children’s heads, the shapes made by their arms, and their shared sense of purpose; sunlight glances off their backs through the tall weeds and shines into the murky pond.”

“This is another photograph taken while we were on holiday in Cornwall, though in a different year and a different rented house. My younger daughter had cut her finger, probably while trying to remove the bacon from a crabbing hook—there are several crabs in the blue bucket. I had my camera over my shoulder, and she liked the idea of having the drama of her cut finger recorded on film. I was drawn to the light, color, and texture of the pebble-dashed wall. It was rough—the kind of surface that could easily scrape your finger if you brushed against it.”

Her portraits of her children encompass the wide range of emotions a mother experiences while watching her family grow. Alongside her career in documentary and fashion photography, Emma recorded the intimacy of motherhood with a tender hand.

“This is a kind of image I often make. As a young girl, I was deeply moved by religious paintings, which our teachers introduced to us in art class. Some of the world’s greatest painters devoted enormous amounts of time to creating religious scenes. For me, their appeal lay not only in religion but also in their emotion, romance, and color. All of that had a profound influence on me.”

Although the photographs were taken around the world and in every kind of weather, they remain consistent in their essential integrity and honesty toward the children.

“My son went through a phase when he would climb everywhere without touching the floor. In this photograph, he stepped from a bench onto a row of coat hooks beneath the window. Gripping them tightly, he worked his way back toward the door like a superhero, completing the entire course. The picture was taken in a house we had rented for a summer holiday in Cornwall. The light through the window probably determined the photograph: I must have noticed it and deliberately suggested another climbing challenge so that I could take the picture.”

“This photograph was taken in Suffolk one February morning, on my way home after dropping the children off at school. I was delighted to find that the strange combination of frost and mist was still lingering, since the two are usually mutually exclusive. I had my camera with me, and my younger daughter’s coat was perfectly attuned to the weather. As a young photographer and the mother of three small children, I wanted to remain open to images like this and let them present themselves naturally.”

“This was taken inside Rudolf Stingel’s installation during the Venice Biennale. He created an oversized version of a classic antique carpet that covered the floors, walls, and ceilings of the Palazzo Grassi. The vast scale was uncanny; we felt like tiny creatures crawling through an immense, repeating succession of spaces.”

Emma and her husband’s first house, in Suffolk, England, was the home where their children grew up. After her husband left, she remained there for another four years.

By then, the children had lost interest in being photographed. To sustain her momentum, Emma began photographing her mother.

“As my eldest daughter grew older, she began to dislike being photographed, and I generally respected that completely. But on this occasion the light was so dreamily beautiful, and so was she. When I raised the camera, she frowned and turned away from the lens, but I pressed the shutter anyway. I felt terrible. Photography continually confronts me with the same questions: Can I take this picture? Should I? Do I dare? I stole this photograph. That was not right, although I comfort myself with its delicate beauty and keep it as a reminder to remain vigilant and careful.”

“On the day we left the house, I could hardly bear to pack the last few things. I left this lamp until the end because it was so delicate and I wanted to move it myself. Anyone who has moved house will recognize the emotion of leaving a place you love: letting go, gathering your strength, and moving forward. The lamp had been bought at a market in Portugal decades earlier. Though it had lost a few leaves, it survived the move. Its shade, however, had been thinned by years of sunlight and did not endure. When I unpacked it, it vanished like mist.”

“I like life itself to give me a fundamental reason to make something,” she says of her new subject. Mother and daughter collaborated on the settings and clothing. In one portrait, her mother sits before a painting of her own mother, bringing the gazes of three generations together. Only later, when Emma tried to organize the work, did the photographs begin to reveal aspects of herself. “It was as if I had turned the camera on myself,” she says.

“This is a portrait of my mother when she was nearly eighty. She is sitting in front of a portrait of her own mother, painted around 1907, when my grandmother was eighteen or nineteen. More than a century separates the two portraits. Although I planned this particular portrait in no more than a few minutes, I intended to photograph my mother as much as possible during her stay with me and my family in Suffolk. I find her gaze profoundly moving, holding so much that deserves to be preserved—not only her beauty, but also a sense of resignation that comes with age.”

In the spring of her final year in the house, Emma realized that she would never again see her beloved garden in bloom. As an elegy, she gathered flowers in the kitchen, arranged them beneath the window, and photographed them slowly, methodically, and lovingly. In the book, their appearance marks a subtle change in the weather. “For me, it is a feeling, or a sequence of feelings,” she says.

“These flower pictures were all taken in the spring of 2017. I had grown and tended the flowers for many years, and every spring I loved seeing them bloom. That year, I knew it would be the last time I saw them flowering at home, and I wanted to make a kind of visual elegy. I chose some of my favorites and placed them on the kitchen counter. The slate bore fossils of its own, along with the marks left by twenty-five years of busy family life. I allowed the flowers to wilt slightly, giving them a languor suspended somewhere between life and death. Then I photographed them slowly and carefully.”

When she left the house, Emma knew that this period of making photographs had come to an end. In sharing the work, her purpose became simple once more: as a photographer, it made sense to gather the images into a book, present them to an audience, and allow viewers to receive them in their own way. “An experience becomes fuller when it is shared,” she says.

Note: The images are reproduced from the photobook, and all rights belong to their original creator.

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