Photographer Heather Evans Smith has created a beautiful project, Seen Not Heard, about the mother/daughter relationship.  Expanding on her previous projects that examine marriage and motherhood, Heather has long been a conceptual self portrait artist, creating striking visual narratives of her foray into themes of adulthood.  The results are at once personal and universal. Her new series shifts the focus onto to her daughter and her deeply considered photographs explore the emotion of how mothers and  daughters are connected and also reflect notions of play, of attachment, of history, and most importantly, of love.

Heather Evans Smith is an award winning fine art and conceptual portrait photographer based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her work captures both the everyday and the whimsical, telling stories of women and struggle, reality and the surreal.

Smith’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions, magazines, literary journals and online publications. Recently, she was chosen as a winner of Ron Howard’s Project Imaginat10n and one of the Critical Mass Top 50 of 2014.

SEEN NOT HEARD

For the past few years I have been creating images to express the emotions of motherhood. My daughter has never been included in those images. But as she has grown from a baby into a force of nature all her own, I was drawn to pull her into my world of conceptual photography and explore our relationship during a time when emotions of love, stress and confusion are high.

Seen Not Heard takes its title from the Old English adage “To Be Seen and Not Heard”, a term often thrown about in reference to the desired behavior of children. These images are silent, but they create a voluble visual narrative on the relationship between parent and child. They explore the cycles that are passed down through generations and the tension between keeping to what is known and forging a newer, and perhaps stronger, path. As strong as the close, forever bond between mother and daughter is, there also exists a distance inherent between two different individuals.