Field Notes No. 1 from Reflections of Womanhood, an ongoing photography project

The Call

I hopped on a minute late, doing some last-minute wrangling of my kids. Lana was already in the chat room, waiting. My initial impression was that she had a natural beauty, one that needed no makeup but was beautiful in its own light. We went through the basic questions: where she's from, her age.

"I'm almost 20," she said.

"So, 19. Got it," I replied, and we shared a laugh. I followed up by sharing how, now that I'm 30, I like to tell people I'm in my late 20s as a joke. A quick glimpse into a woman's relationship with age: anxious to grow up until we reach a certain point, and then we long for our youth again. In all seriousness, I know 30 isn't old, but it's a reminder that time is moving along.

The Questions

We moved on to what it means to be a woman. This is where things got interesting for me. When I asked Lana what she thought a woman's essence was, her answer was three words: "nature, kindness, and power." I agreed. These are words I would choose too.

We talked about cultural expectations, and pivotal moments surrounding womanhood in her life. She shared a little about her upbringing and her Tunisian ancestry, and how that plays a role in how she views marriage and her role as a woman. Her relationship to that culture is complicated, though. She was raised in the south of France, with her roots in Tunisia, and there wasn't much she could offer me beyond her everyday experience of living there as a young woman.

"The camera is a powerful instrument. But it is an instrument of a person, and that person has a bias." — Dorothea Lange

A conversation between a 19-year-old and a 30-year-old. Eleven years' difference, a generational gap that seems subtle but nonetheless has its contrast. As the photographer, I came into this wanting specific answers, anticipating the responses, thinking that every woman's experience was my own, irrespective of age. This is where I began to learn something from Lana.

"Tell me, what are three words that represent the struggle of a woman?"

She paused. "Hmm, let me think on that for a second."

"Sure," I said, "take your time."

"I sometimes don't know how to explain things very well in English," she said.

"C'est pas grave," I replied. "Je parle un petit peu français."

We switched to French, but even after several moments, she still struggled to come up with three words for the struggle of women. A bit disappointed, I said, "It's okay. If it comes to you, you can send it to me in my DMs." We moved on.

The Turn

The final question I asked her was what message she wanted to send to the world as a woman. "Watching the women around you while you were growing up, is there anything you want to do differently? Something different from your mom, or your aunts, or the women who raised you?"

I tightened my gaze, ready to receive all the juicy details.

"Well, actually, no," she said.

I sighed.

"My mother is my model, and I'd like to do things the way she did." Interesting, I thought.

"Tell me more," I said.

"Well, she sacrificed a lot for us, and she's the most important person in my life."

As she spoke, I flashed back to my own relationship with my mother growing up. She was my best friend, though I always felt like I was her protector (a story for another time). Now that I'm married, our relationship has taken on a different shape. Check-ins are less frequent, as my husband has taken on the role of confidant that my mother once held during my single years.

"Hmm," I said. Thrown off, but pleasantly surprised, I realized that maybe what I'd come into this call hoping to find wasn't what I would leave with. "My original intention was to do a shoot with just you, Lana. But now I think I'd like to do a portrait of you and your mother together. Do you think she'd be interested in that?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I think she would."

We set a date and time for the shoot.

Mind you, this call only lasted about twenty minutes. I hadn't had my morning caffeine yet, and being an introvert at heart, I didn't want it to run too long. We said our goodbyes, and I hung up.

What I Left With

Sitting there afterward, thinking back on what had just happened, I began to see the truth in something I've been noticing in the photographers I've been studying lately:

"The photographer's choice of starting point, angle, and frame is itself an act of exclusion." — John Berger

I had chosen my angle, and the camera ended up pointed in a different direction than I expected. Being someone who likes to follow the random paths life leads me down, I decided to lean into it. Had my own experiences, with my upbringing, with men, with marriage, with motherhood, caused me to focus only on loss? And what was so different about Lana's upbringing that led her to hold onto only the positives of being a woman? Is it youth? Is it having a good mother? I'm not sure. But it was a reminder that though we share a chromosomal piece, what we're each protesting isn't the same, if we're protesting anything at all.

"You must have the quality of a brain that is inquiring, looking, searching, asking, questioning, doubting. Not only doubting others, your books and so on, but doubting your own thinking, questioning your own responses and reactions." — J. Krishnamurti, Where Can Peace Be Found?

I was once called a "cynic" in ninth grade, by a guy in my algebra class. "No, I'm not," I said at the time, not even sure what the word fully meant. But sitting here at 30, I wonder if there was some truth to that. What does it mean to be a feminist? (Though I sometimes hate that word.) Does it mean finding what's wrong in our experience as women and fighting for the betterment of it, or fighting to protect the good things and give them room to flourish even more abundantly?

This project is off to an interesting start. I wonder if the pieces I'm finding will add up to something worth telling, or something clear at all. We'll find out in due time, I guess.