Good Mothers
Sabrina Jung

The series ‚Good Mothers’ deals with the patriarchal construct of the social role of the ‚good mother‘. Working with old photographs of girls posing with their dolls and processing the material by using digital and manual methods to emphasize this. The material originates from the 1940s to 1950s of various European photo studios. The girls were staged as they handled their dolls in a caring or loving gesture, but also in moments of inattentiveness with the doll.
Reflecting the conflict that many women get into due to the unfulfillable role construction of the ‚good mother' – Mothers are never good enough, they have to be the superlative. Likewise women, who do not have and/or do not want to have children, are not good enough either, because they do not fulfill or serve the construct of ‚family‘. They come across as selfish or self-centered, whereas childless men are not valued/devalued in this way.
Inherent in all photographs are themes that we still deal with today, but which we encounter, see or question differently due to the temporal distance. By editing the private photo it is transformed into a state that anonymizes the person, moving an individual forward into a representative for many humans. Like the ‚Holy Maria‘, the girls in these pictures represent an innocent, virgin mother. In theses images the baby doll remains still an object, the childs were interacting with in various poses. Sometimes mothers also have ambivalent feelings towards their children, they are not always just the loving and caring mother, they also experience crises, have mood swings, sometimes feel overwhelmed or bored, ...
The girls received the doll in order to learn the social role of the mother, to take care in a loving way of a baby. By repeating to place the doll into the girl's arms, visualized by the manual collage of the doll onto the print, the wish to make the process visible once again, as coming from the outside is obvious.
It is time to transform the role of the ‚good mother’ into a contemporary, realistic image that no longer degrades and judges women.