Our mums and us is a photographic series that documents a selection of Ponch Hawkes’ female contemporaries standing with their mothers. This series was originally shown at Brummels Gallery of Photography, Melbourne, in 1976 and was Hawkes’s first exhibited body of work. Like other early work by Hawkes, this series adopts the straight-forward approach of social documentary photography. The subjects have been photographed as full figures, within the context of the family home. As a consequence, the images record generational shifts and aspects of style in personal fashion and domestic décor.
As the use of pronouns in the title suggests, Our mums and us was made by women, of women, and for women. It is a defiant and celebratory feminist gesture, which foregrounds women as both independent and connected to each other. Hawkes has only used the subjects’ first names to title the images, which emphasises the intimacy of the relationships captured in the series and embraces the ordinariness of the everyday.
(2014)
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
