Emma Hardy - PERMISSIONS - 2022

'Permissions', the first monograph by photographer Emma Hardy, is a tender document about motherhood and childhood, love and nostalgia, and the abandonment of the home. The book's images have been compiled and distilled from Hardy's personal archive and span a 20-year period.

The photographs in the book show moments of recognizable domesticity interspersed with more idyllic scenes. The images reveal Hardy's attempts to balance a creative professional life with motherhood, watching their children grow and change and the relationship with their own mother mature. The book is divided into chapters, each announced by a large-format still life of homemade flowers, created as a farewell during the last spring spent in the family home. As the book progresses, Hardy's children become increasingly independent and begin to venture far away and outside the frame. The project reached its natural conclusion when the family moved house.

The world brings colors to the child and the child organizes them, cuts them into shapes, learns the names of the shapes, and pronounces them for the first time. Animals, fruits, leaves, water... Of course, most of these colors and shapes are not brought by the world, abstract and indistinct, but by the mother... Understanding the mother's presence in the child's mind is not very different from looking at a family album: a person, the photographer, usually absent, and yet an integral part not only of the production of the photograph, but also of the scene — of life — in itself." - Alice Zoo, from the book's essay.