Intimate Photos that Celebrate the Mother-Daughter Relationship

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Bettina lies on the couch between her daughters Lilja and Pina, photographed in fits of laughter. Immortalised in each others’ arms on the couch, the trio look like friends at a sleepover. But Bettina isn’t Lilja and Pina’s mate – she’s their mother.

Can a mother also be a friend? That’s what the photo series Das Muttertier (“The Mother Animal”) by Berlin-based photographer Lucia Jost asks. Jost’s work captures the closeness and vulnerability of the mother-daughter relationship without reducing either party to stereotype. In her series, mothers and daughters are portrayed less like clichés and more like individuals who exist in the space between relative authority and intimacy.

Jost, who already published a series about young mothers last year, decided not to photograph them with their sons this time around, to really focus on one of the most important relationships in her own life. “I noticed that the older I get, the more my mother sees herself in me,” she tells VICE. “At the same time, I've also started to understand her better and better. After all, every mum was once a daughter.” 

Jost’s photos represent this ongoing cycle and documents what she describes as her ongoing fascination with “women in all their facets”, motherhood being just one of them. She says that she’s endlessly impressed by the emotional and physical dedication required to raise a child: “I don't like it when mothers are put in a box. They are, above all, strong and loving women, and I want to celebrate them for that.”

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