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The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

To say the subject of Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s book is a diary of motherhood doesn’t get anywhere near to the fleshy, playful vulnerability of her pictures. Titled Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, the Hungarian photographer’s journal is a kind of traveller’s tale from the magical and estranging foreign land of childbirth. “When I realised I was pregnant,” she writes, by way of introduction, “I had no idea what awaited me. How messy and how raw, how unpredictable and how out of control motherhood really was compared to the images I had in my mind from films, photos, paintings done by men.”

Her images take you deep into that out-of-control place, her body no longer all her own, colonised by other dramatic forces. Her camera watches it all swell, as she pictures befores and afters: “Then I was an emerging artist, travelling around and going to art fairs and exhibitions and openings. Now I am a mother of two working on borrowed time hoping the years I’ve lost to mothering can be written into my CV without guilt and shame.”

This picture is a sort of triumphant coda to some of the exhausting, beautiful, comic struggles between mother and new life that have gone on before. The raspberries on her child’s fingers provide visual echoes of earlier pages of tender breastfed intimacies. “This work in progress, which will always be a work in progress,” she writes, poses many questions. One is: “How can something so universal as motherhood be so lonely?” Others are: “What about our bodies, our hormones, our thoughts, our friends, our loves? Our careers, our homes, our dishes, our laundry, our sexual desires?” Her book provides her with an answer of sorts: “I love being a mother. I also loved being an artist.”