There is a desire on the part of many photographers to examine their lives through the cataloguing and documenting of familial objects. Jeannette Montgomery Barron has a body of work, My Mother’s Clothes, that has resonated with the photography and the fashion worlds, and with the offspring of women with a strong sense of style. My Mother’s Clothes was originally created exclusively for her mother, “to help spark her memories from the past; she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The project worked; my mother and I looked together at the photographs I had taken and she would remember parts of her past.” But the project represents a universal approach to understanding a parent through the choices they made about their wardrobes, and the evocative details and sensory traces that are left behind.

Jackson Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta is exhibiting this work through August 28th and Jeannette has published a book under the same title. Currently dividing her time between Rome and Conneticut, Jeannette was born in Atlanta and studied photography at the ICP in NYC.

Images from My Mother’s Clothes