[The Guardian] The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

Hungarian photographer Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s playful portrait of her child, part of series on becoming a parent, combines humour and intimacy

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.”

Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back by Andi Gáldi Vinkó is published by Trolley Books (£40)

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