Her images are beautiful. As an aspiring photographer, I am fascinated by the way she plays with light and captures faces and emotions. I love her pictures.
In the documentary, The Mother Project, videographers take pictures of a woman taking pictures. The photographer sees her world through camera lenses, constantly posing her children, her mother, and herself. They are all accustomed to being Tierney's subjects.
Her work is also controversial. Sometimes, they are naked, sometimes clothed, sometimes wearing masks. In one scene, she is talking about her mother's childhood and how her mother "saw things a child shouldn't see"--while she and her mother are naked in the room with the children, her mother standing on the bed.
Her mother (in her sixties) suffers schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In some ways, the daughter seems to be her mother's mother; in other ways, she's an obsessive observer of her mother and of herself as mother. Her subjects are always--at least in this film--her mother and her two, then three, children.
Watching this, I felt like a voyeur. Without any editorializing on the part of the film makers, the photographer and her family speak for themselves. While the mental illness of the mother is obvious in every scene of the documentary, her daughter's photographs are beautiful portraits of a normal-seeming woman.
And yet--Tierney is criticized for the nudity, especially of the children. Some call her work pornographic. She un-self-consciously bares it all. In more ways than bodily, the players in the photographer's soul stories are naked.
This is an intriguing portrait of an artist making portraits. She crosses lines that many viewers consider going too far. She is posed on the thin line that separates normal and strange--a line she knows well. She grew up on that fragile thread.
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