I first met Martine Fougeron when she won the Berenice Abbott Prize for an Emerging Photographer. I had been aware of the work she was doing, photographing her adolescent sons, and it was great to see the work in person. Martine’s insightful images have continued to garner awards and attention, and her newest, and possilby last chapter in the Tete-a-Tete series, is titled, Tet-aTete VII: After Prom. I marvel at her ability to document these experiences, as my own children would have shut the door to this kind of access.

Her work has recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, and she is preparing a final edit of five years of work for a book proposal. I am also in the process of editing live interviews conducted with my two sons and their friends before they left for College, which shall be integrated in the book as excerpts and transformed into a short movie. The interviews explore ‘the secret behind the secret’ of the photographs. The teenagers comment on how having a photo of an experience changes the experience and express their perception of being photographed by ‘a mother’.