Why neutrals might never die
Photographing motherhood and "releasing expectations" with Jillian Guyette
Photographer Jillian Guyette and I started DMing on Insta about our shared love of the podcast Maintenance Phase (two of our fave episodes include this one on Moon Juice and this one on Weight Watchers) because you really can make genuine connections via social media even if individual social media platforms are flawed as fuck! We’ve stayed in touch since those initial MP convos, and because imagery is everything in momfluencer culture, and because the idealization of motherhood is conveyed specifically through the medium of photography on Instagram, I thought Jillian might be able to elucidate how photography trends influence the way motherhood is idealized and performed on social media.
Jillian graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a BFA in Fine Art Photography before moving to New York City, where she spent a short time working in the photo department at Martha Stewart Living, before working as the in-house photographer for Free People in Philadelphia. IN 2017, she decided to pursue her freelance work full time. Her work is beautiful, sometimes dreamy, sometimes haunting, and always real.
Here’s our chat!
Tell me about how your work intersects with social media. What’s it like working in the wild west of the influencer economy?
For a few years, I created lots of social content for a handful of brands (mostly for their Instagram accounts), and the pay was rarely commensurate with the actual labor and time involved. It never aligned, and it was very taxing on my mental health, particularly during the pandemic when our house was acting as a tiny photo studio and I was taking care of a baby full-time. None of it felt good for how I wanted to be working in photography and I was a mess over it. The idea of content creation has always made me feel incredibly itchy, and while I knew it wouldn’t be longterm work for me, I still decided to cut the cord and completely stop working with companies in that way. I also closed my food and lifestyle blog which was a huge time and energy suck. That shift in energy is what has allowed me to get back to a more true-to-me approach of working.
What does a "true-to-me" approach to work mean for you?
This is tough to describe! I love film and have shot in film since I was 18 years old, but over the years, I found I was shooting in film less frequently. There’s also the fact that I spent 5 years shooting for a fashion brand that mostly wasn't the style of my personal work, and it was such a grind. Then I got sucked into content creation which is very formulaic. So it has taken me quite a long time to come back to what felt like my own voice when I pick up my camera. My work is very calming, which is something I think about constantly, particularly now that I’m shooting personal work that’s just so deeply rooted in femininity. Photography is still such a boys club, particularly commercial photography. It’s all so male dominated and it can be difficult to find your footing, confidence, and your voice as woman. I am constantly having this conversation with other women in the photo industry; we still feel the need to explain to clients that pregnancy won’t inhibit our work, we still feel pressure to hide our pregnancies, and sometimes even hide the simple fact that we’re mothers at all.
Why did the idea of content creation historically make you feel itchy?
I think largely because the monetary compensation structure is so different than the compensation structure of traditional advertising. Brands are looking to get a lot more photography for a lot less money, and a whole ton of image usage. If they were to go the traditional route, they would likely have to pay for the additional work and images, but I’ve seen time and time again with content creation a bit of exploitation across the board in how they’re paying for the work vs. what they’re getting out of it. If brands are using images for advertising purposes (like a sponsored targeted instagram or Facebook ad, email marketing, etc), then that all needs to be negotiated and paid for appropriately. When it’s not paid for appropriately, it makes it more difficult for other photographers in the industry as a whole to get paid fairly and appropriately.
What sort of companies have you done content creation for?
For a few years, I was consistently shooting content for a clothing company, a bag company, and a brand in the home / lifestyle realm. I also had tons of one-off clients that liked the styling of our house and would just want a small shoot here or there that I would put together for them, sometimes on location but lots of times just around our house.
When I was creating content, it was particularly draining for me because I keep our home very curated. My husband and I are super visual and we both genuinely enjoy interior design, but once you have to overanalyze the space for a photoshoot, and for brands to sell something constantly, it changes that conversation. I felt like I wasn’t making changes or taking chances with our space because I knew I would have to move something for a shoot or take it down all the time. I basically needed to keep everything photoshoot ready and wow did that get old fast.
Oh my gosh, I bet! What was your food and lifestyle blog?
My blog was called A Better Happier St. Sebastian (a line from my fav Frank O’Hara poem), which sort of naturally was shortened to Better Happier. It started out mostly as a food blog, and then I shifted into lifestyle here and there. I actually really love writing so I think that’s a big part of what kept me motivated to post there, and the thing I loved most towards the end was featuring some of the women I photographed alongside interviews.
For laypeople, what does working in the commercial and editorial world look like? Like what sort of brands and companies are you working with, what sort of stuff are you taking pictures of?
So magazines and publications are editorial clients, which tend to have more creative freedom and provide opportunities to meet interesting people which I love. I’ve shot for Condé Nast Traveler, the Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, House Beautiful, and Philadelphia Magazine to name just a few. Commercial clients are all over the place. I’ve done advertising work for Intuit Quickbooks, Apoterra, Scotch Brite, Morton Salt, and The Laundress to name a few.
One of my favorite unicorn assignments many years ago was for Leica, where I photographed a Manhattan travel guide that was printed into these little guidebooks that were placed in the Chatwal Hotel. I photographed The Tahini Table cookbook not long before the pandemic which was another favorite project to date.
Which Instagram momfluencers do you see as being being intuitive, talented photographers?
I’m pretty sure @little.winnie was my first toe dip into the mom instagram world, she comes to mind.
@taylranne pops up in my feed a lot and she is definitely nailing that cozy, neutral mom life vibe.
Speaking of neutrals, what is UP with all the neutrals in momfluencer land?
I mean, first of all, people naturally imitate what they’re seeing on each other’s feeds. Neutrals are also easy to digest, and everyone has has the same Lightroom filter which makes for a ton of content you can flip through quickly without experiencing visual changes. And to me, it really feels like the death of creativity in spaces like Instagram. Mostly because it forces people to create the same thing over and over again to feed the machine that is Instagram. And that machine is trying to sell you things.
It becomes stale and rigid when you can’t explore your creativity for the sake of just exploring creativity and sharing. You’re beholden to a filter and a style that’s been proven to get clicks, so you create on a continuous loop. Is there any joy left after you’ve done that repeatedly? Is that a fulfilling creative process? Here are some classic white/beige photos (these photos also tend to feature hidden faces and chopped off body parts). I feel like this photographic style might never be going away because it feels so much like the classic Instagram aesthetic?
Does the all white/all beige aesthetic trend mimic trends in the photography industry in general?
Similar visual trends happen in the photo industry. There are certain photographic styles that feel very of-the-moment, but then those pictures get recycled and pinned onto countless inspiration boards and then that once fresh style gets constantly requested for new shoots, and this causes an endless supply of very one-note imagery.
What do you make of the relationship between aesthetics and motherhood? Obviously, the labor of motherhood is active, not passive. But motherhood and static imagery are so bound up in each other, right? We crave the imagery of beautiful motherhood. Aesthetically pleasing motherhood.
I am naturally so attracted to aesthetically pleasing images (no surprise there since I make pictures for a living!) and since having my daughter, I’ve found myself also drawn to aspirational pictures of families and motherhood. But these aspirational images also can drive me crazy. It’s this dichotomy that really came to a head for me during the pandemic, when I began approaching my work and how I photograph my daughter very differently after realizing that the imagery I was consuming was impacting the work I was creating. During the pandemic, I was taking pictures that felt very true to me and how I was moving through motherhood, but more often and not, those weren’t the pictures I was sharing. I still had a picture in my head that I was chasing of what motherhood was supposed to look like, and I had to really strip that back so that I could breathe again, and move through it all much more realistically.
What sort of photos were you finding yourself share? What picture of motherhood were you chasing? How has your approach changed? And what does motherhood that feels true to you look like in a photograph?
For a while I fell into the trope of sharing photos of she and I looking just perfectly serene in this baby bliss bubble together, or I would share a particularly curated photo of her nursing. I’d find myself wanting to look fresh or wanting my body to look how it looked pre-pregnancy. And looking back, I think my desire for my motherhood to look a certain way was a bit of a reaction to being isolated with a baby and consuming loads of mom-directed content on my phone.
I remember feeling a visceral shift between the motherhood content I was consuming versus the reality of what I was experiencing a little after my daughter’s first birthday. My Breathing Room series is largely a response to that shift.
And now, I don’t have an intended final format in mind when I’m shooting. I’m not shooting it so I can stick it on Instagram, there’s no timeline, no finish line. I could care less if people on Instagram engage with it. There’s just me, there’s her, and the world around us as we move through it, often with a camera in my hand.
Also, toddlers are notoriously difficult to photograph. Which has been such a lesson for me in releasing expectation. If the picture I’m trying to make is a struggle, it’s not supposed to happen. That feels like the truest aspect of the pictures I make of her.
Last year, I photographed babies born during the pandemic in the Philadelphia area and that particular assignment really stirred something in me. Two of the pictures from that assignment were chosen for the American Photography 38 competition recently.
What do you think about consciously and deliberately curating your Instagram feed so you’re not relentlessly bombarded with picture-perfect motherhood coming at you from all angles all the time?
The pandemic made me really hit pause and actively stop consuming so much motherhood imagery from the internet. It’s an interesting balance, working as a photographer but then also being compelled to photograph your family. It wasn’t until I consciously stepped back from consuming so much motherhood content that I was able to really focus on work that was calling me to make it. I’m very certain that my current personal work about motherhood and my daughter (and navigating what motherhood feels and looks like as an artist) only got its sea legs because I took a break, and (still do take breaks) from the endless scroll of picture perfect motherhood. It feels complicated because I see so much joy and beauty while being a mom, and I think a lot of us crave that rosy picture of motherhood that we’ve been sold, but once the reality and labor of actually raising humans sets in, viewing completely unrealistic depictions of it en masse is undeniably unhealthy for all of us.
I’ve begun slowly collecting photo books about childhood, or books by female photographers photographing their children. It’s helped me reframe how I thought about all of it. Childhood, pictures of childhood, how we share those pictures. Mother’s Days is an incredible book, edited by Bruce Weber, Nan Bush, and Leslie Lambert, which shows very tender pictures Imogen Cunningham took of her three sons as they grew up. I have such a visceral reaction to this book when I spend time with it. Looking at it just now as I was writing this, it felt like a reminder of the raw beauty of childhood, away from the noise and consumerism of the internet.
Yes! The brilliant Winky Lewis took my author headshots, and she collaborated with writer Susan Conley to create this utterly gorgeous book that makes me cry every time I open it. In the best way.
Ahhh! This book! I somehow don’t know this one and I am in Maine all the time! Will be purchasing asap, thank you for the rec. Have you seen the 3191 Miles Apart books? I love those so much, and Stop Here, This is the Place reminds me a little of this.
Thank you so much Jillian!
I hope everyone is surviving summer “break” - it’s our household’s first week “off” and because of Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease, we’ve been childcare-free for two days and I’m fairly certain I have like 73 new tiny little stress-lines near my mouth. I finished this newsletter during one of the no-childcare days and I’m frankly amazed that no one broke a bone (or at least a dish) while I was upstairs writing with earplugs in.
There are legos everywhere and butter smearing several surfaces but we’re FINE. And popsicles. There are popsicles!
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