MOTHER - The images I still love.

These are the photos I still love‎. Like children, when it's you own your children, you see the beauty in them, yes, you see the flaws, they might not be the popular kids in school...but you love them, you love them as they are. You must, they are yours. These are the images that were not chosen to be in my book, MOTHER. After having Prestel committing to publishing the book of this work‎, I narrowed down 10 years of work to 165 images. Hundreds of photos had to go. When I sat down with Karen Levine‎, my great editor who I loved and trusted, we started editing down the work...when we got to 140, it was hard for me to continue eliminating images and so I left Karen to do the 'dirty work'. And she did...and 15 more images had to go. Some other images didn't even make it to the first edit, mostly since over the years while making the work of MOTHER, I had collaborated with curators and galleries on exhibitions and in the process, some other images were marked as 'not strong enough', and were put away. A few months ago while looking for ‎some files, I went through all the work again. It was after not seeing all the images for over a year. And I suddenly saw them, the images that were too quiet to be noticed, maybe some were just a little awkward, others a little too harsh. And maybe they were indeed not strong enough. And maybe they were strong enough and were just overlooked. And some of them stood out to me...I saw them in a different light, I saw qualities I felt I missed earlier‎. Almost felt guilty for not fighting for them and defending them back then. So here they are. My beloved images, after all. The images I still love.