About the Book:
Mommie: Three Generations of Women is a remarkable photographic portrait of three generations of women in the family of photographer Arlene Gottfried and an intimate story of the inevitable passage of time and aging. Pictured within, we are introduced to Gottfried’s 100 year old immigrant grandmother, fragile mother, and reluctant sister over the breathtaking course of 35 years. An artist turning their eye on their own immediate family is a well explored theme, but Gottfried has achieved the sublime with a multi-decade long commitment to document the intimate lives of her nearest kin. Gottfried succeeds in creating a complete twentieth century portrait of four lives inextricably interwoven through relation, sickness, need, love, and the absence of the only male in the family who passed away while Arlene was still young. Mommie is testament to the passage of time, changes in the generations, losing loved ones and a familial experience at once both similar and unique to all.
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Author Bio:
Arlene Gottfried, born in Brooklyn, graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and worked as a photographer at an ad agency before freelancing for top publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, and The Independent in London. Gottfried has exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York and in Tokyo, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., among others. Her photographs can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Berenice Abbott International Competition of Women’s Documentary Photography. Gottfried is the author of Bacalaitos & Fireworks (powerHouse Books, 2011), Sometimes Overwhelming (powerHouse Books, 2008), Midnight (powerHouse Books, 2003) and The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999). A lecturer and a teacher, Gottfried lives and works in New York City.
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Miss Rosen’s Contribution:
Mommie includes an introduction by Miss Rosen.
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Excerpt from the Introduction:
Arlene Gottfried is a force of nature, a whirlwind, a quiet storm of power, beauty, and strength. From her soul pours forth not only some of the most distinctive portraits but a voice… A voice that comes from deep, down inside the bone, from the marrow where blood is born and truth is known… A voice that vibrates with a force that tells of a spirit that transcends the physical realm and lifts us up, high, higher, highest as we become one with love.
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A woman of voice and vision, Ms. Gottfried overflows with a mystic energy few embody but all can feel. She is a medium, a vessel, a channel through which this current flows from heaven to earth. Mommie, her fifth book, is born of love. Tracing the matrilineal side of her family through her grandmother, mother, and sister, Ms. Gottfried once again shows us that home is where the heart is. Arlene Gottfried speaks candidly here, sharing her path with us.
—Miss Rosen
Brooklyn, 2015
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Book cover courtesy of powerHouse Books
Photographs ©Arlene Gottfried