British photographer, Edith Maybin, plays with our ability to interpret an image in her series, The Tenby Document. A little bit creepy, a lot engaging, these photographs feel like Loretta Lux’s doll-like children caught between childhood, puberty, and womanhood.

“In these photographs Edith Maybin investigates the space between mother and daughter. She takes portraits in a home environment where she and her daughter enact secret stories together whist wearing Marks and Spencer undergarments, a gesture towards Maybin’s own mother and an investigation into female rituals and sentimental inheritance.

These secret stories they then replay until the camera captures the mother and daughter separately in the same position. This allows for digital reassembly and the final presentation of the two as one. Maybin digitally places her five-year-old daughter’s head on her own body; the photograph resolving the dichotomy of the relationship. In closing the gap between mother and daughter these images, whilst formal, subversively provide room for fantasy, identity reversal, and reveried escape.

Inspired by Lady Clementina Hawarden’s photographic tableaux of her daughters, Maybin and daughter paradoxically elude the gaze by way of imaginative abstraction into a place, like Vermeer’s women, intangible.”