VERY MODERN MOTHERS
VERY MODERN MOTHERS
All images: Courtesy Lindsey Smith/Motherz
By Erin Lardy
6 Minute Read
Motherhood and personal identity live in quiet friction. For her photography platform Motherz, Lindsey Smith emotively recasts moms as the glamorous main characters.
For all its joy, new motherhood tends to arrive as a blur. A woman is adjusting to a life she doesn't yet recognize—she’s unfamiliar in her own body, running on almost no sleep, and trying to stay present to the routine of the tiny person she's keeping alive as the days dissolve into one another. This is the season photographer Lindsey Smith most loves to shoot—it’s "deeply beautiful and disorienting" all at once, and one that deserves a witness: not just to the baby or the milestone, but to the whole woman living it. "Motherhood can sometimes unintentionally eclipse the woman underneath it," says Smith.
Photographs can act as a reflection, allowing us to hold a mirror up to ourselves—to observe and to validate ourselves. Amid the newborn whirlwind, many moms don’t get that lens. This lack of visibility prevents her from seeing herself anew, and the absence of tangible proof of her mothering adds friction to her already shifting sense of self. It’s compounded by the fact that the people around her often come up short. The one who sees her most is her child, who takes it all in but can't necessarily reflect it back. Partners, too, tend to be unreliable documentarians, rarely photographing mothers with their kids.
Across the many seasons of motherhood, a woman must keep wrestling with her identity. In her own camera roll, she's rarely the subject; when she is, it's by accident, not intention. So who notices the mom—the magic of her mothering, the beauty of the moment, the woman herself?
Smith does. Through Motherz, her photography platform, she has spent the better part of a decade turning the lens towards the mom. Her photographs are, she says, “a way of preserving both—her connection to her family, but also her individuality within it.” Smith heroes mothers as the main characters of their family portraits. She takes everything real about the ‘everyday’ mom and lends it the glamour usually reserved for the highlight reel or an editorial campaign. Her portraits don't only portray women as mothers, they celebrate her as a three-dimensional being: each photograph honors who she once was, who she currently is, and who she wants to be.
"Motherhood can sometimes unintentionally eclipse the woman underneath it. Photos are a way of preserving…her individuality.”
“When I first started, so much of the motherhood space felt overly polished, overly posed, and a bit the same,” says Smith, whose own daughter just turned five. “I wanted to break that open. To create something punchier, more expressive, and to remind women there’s no formula for a motherhood photoshoot.” Her portfolio is a reflection of this ethos: images of her pregnant college best friend, captured bump-out in the streets of New York—Rihanna-style; a striking black-and-white series of British designer Betsy-Blue English, curlers in, with her baby slung snugly across her hip the way moms do when they need one hand to get ready; women rolling around on the carpet with their kids, warm and unposed as old candids. “I’ve always been completely enraptured by imagery that feels lived-in, a little imperfect, but rich in detail,” says Smith, “That balance has always been it for me.”
The magnetism of Smith's subjects is heightened by the intention behind her styling—a collaboration with her creative right hand and Motherz wardrobe stylist, Halley Hollis. Hollis uses clothing and accessories to subvert the expected image of a mother. Some subjects are shot in states of undress—a bra, a robe slipping open—curled up with their kids, tender and strong at once. Others are dressed for beyond the home: a tailored suit, a designer heel shot against the unmistakable fleshy leg of a toddler, giving a glimpse of the woman she is out in the world. That a viewer could land on any of these images and immediately want to be her—to embody her, to wonder who she is at work, with friends—is the essence of Smith's superpower.
The idea of treating a mother the way a magazine treats its cover subject came naturally. Smith, who is self-taught, grew up sifting through stacks of imagery for hours: editorial photography, fashion magazines, photography books, and old family albums. At twelve, on a trip to New York with her dad, she spent all her souvenir money on black-and-white film for her mom's Olympus and roamed the city shooting; she still has the camera, and still brings it to sessions. She was the girl in school who always carried around disposable cameras, developing film and scrapbooking in her free time. "I've always viewed photography as both documentation and art," she says. The photographer she returns to most is Greg Williams, whose work she calls "intimate and cinematic at the same time"—a “lived-in honesty” she chases in her own frames.
Motherz founder Lindsay Smith
Before Motherz, Smith, 36, worked in creative direction, concepting shoots and directing talent, work that began when she co-founded a creative agency whose first client was Giuliana Rancic—an entrée into the orbit of women around E! that still shapes how she works with clients. "I'm definitely not a wallflower photographer," she says. "I'm talking, guiding, helping direct energy," but she does know when to step back and let a real moment unfold. Her images live “somewhere between candid and directional,” she says—"like fragments pulled from a magazine spread."
“So much of the motherhood space felt overly polished and posed. I wanted to break that open.”
Smith’s early clients were everyday women she encountered through her agency work; they had a hard time finding family photographers with an editorial eye. “I started offering sessions quietly to my brand clients, documenting their everyday lives during my LA visits. A lot of those sessions took place at home, making breakfast in the kitchen, playing in the living room, holding babies in the middle of beautifully imperfect moments,” she says, “There’s something really beautiful about documenting people where life is actually happening, in the environments that hold their memories and reflect their style and energy.”
When she sends a new client her questionnaire and asks for a photo, the same thing usually happens: the mother sends pictures of her kids or a lo-fi photo of herself. "Aside from selfies, they're rarely in them," she says, “Much of my work is correcting that.”
The difference is largely how mothers are framed. “I take great care to make them the focal point of the frame alongside their children,” she says, “Not just as someone caring for everyone else, but as the subject herself. A woman with presence, style, emotion, identity, and complexity.” Even in family photos, the mother is often “subtly centered” for the hero shot, while a partner surfaces only in fragments: “a hand, a silhouette, a moment unfolding around her,” describes Smith.
“Before she was ‘mom,’ she was just a girl. It’s beautiful [to] honor and rediscover that woman instead of placing her in a box.”
Smith's commitment to pulling the woman back into view mirrors a broader shift in brands, publications, and artists increasingly placing mothers at the center, portraying them with dimension and strength. She points to the Jacquemus Le Valérie bag campaign, Simon Porte Jacquemus's tribute to his mother, as a kind of north star. “There’s this sweetness woven through it, almost as if he’s behind the camera as a child,” says Smith, "Coming home, his mother arranging the calendar, carrying groceries, being playful—it's the magic in the mundane." What she admires most is Jacquemus's commitment to honoring his mother's whole identity—the reminder that she's "a full person with her own quirks, style, humor, and inner world… Before she was 'mom,' she was just a girl," Smith says. "There's something really beautiful about honoring and rediscovering that woman instead of placing her in a box."
That, in the end, is what a Motherz session gives back. Smith wants a woman to look at the images and feel something: "beautiful, creative, excited, tender-hearted," to see herself the way her child sees her. It's personal: Smith had her own daughter during the pandemic and never took professional maternity photos, something she still wishes she had. “The pictures become something a family will treasure later, but in the present, they offer something just for her—a tangible reminder of that feeling, that all-consuming love,” she says. “It's not just about being seen. It’s about [the gift of] remembering too.”
That impulse cuts against the current. Momfluencer culture has made a certain kind of self-documentation suspect—see the discourse around Nara Smith’s polish, the reflexive cry of “performative” aimed at any mother who is too glamorous or composed. It trickles down: moms shy away from any content that looks like it required effort. Smith’s work pushes back on that instinct. Caring for ourselves as women and claiming the narrative center isn’t vanity. It’s how we understand our most formative seasons through a fuller, more embodied lens.
