“No doubt I will be unwell, until I write something having to do with her”. This sentence by Roland Barthes in his Mourning Diary dated 15 December 1978, just over a year after the death of his mother, heralds the writing of his famous book Camera Lucida in the spring of 1979. A theoretical essay on the nature of the photographic medium, the text is structured around a quest: to find, in images, the truth of the beloved face, that of his dead mother.

Her gaze the first mirror of the self and the surrounding world, the mother remains a fundamental theme in the history of art. The works assembled here, distinctive as much in their contexts (social, geographical, temporal) as in the formal and aesthetic approaches that guided their creation, share the common trait of going beyond mere testimony. Between social critique and pursuit of the self, conjuration and solace, incarnating presence or the effects of absence, each work touches on the question of filiation and what remains of it.

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