All You Need to Know about the Real Modern Woman with this Photo Series
The topic of how women and moms are expected to juggle family, career, emotions, lunches, schedules, etc. during normal life, let alone during a pandemic, has come up countless times the past two years. Modern women have been stretched to the max in COVID times leaving them with the choice of leaving work to care for the family, or juggling both to the point of total exhaustion.
New York City-based photographer and social activist Lanie McNulty decided to showcase this by utilizing her artistry in the form of a photo series connecting women from today back to the original notion of the female experience.
I had the privilege of asking Lanie about her photo series and book, The Angel in the House, containing portraits of women at home with children, husbands, parents, friends, and alone. The images are stunning, evocative, and all too familiar. Here’s what she had to say…
What originally inspired you to dive into this series?
The Angel in the House began with my personal regret that, despite my best intentions and opportunities, I somehow hadn’t heeded Virginia Woolf’s directive to “kill the angel in the house.” Citing a popular Victorian poem by Coventry Patmore, an homage to the ideal woman as virtuous, devoted to her domestic duties and her husband’s pleasure, and docile despite her misery, loneliness, and abuse, Woolf urged women to defy that calling in order to be set free to write, to create, to realize our human potential. Well, I somehow missed that message. By that I mean I thought I could do it all -- be a mother and a wife, but also fulfill my ambitions as an artist, a working woman, and a good friend. But I found it impossible.
Artistically, I was fascinated by how people’s physical spaces reveal the dynamics in human relationships. On a personal level, I was looking for answers to my own struggles as the ambivalent angel, trying to balance life as a mother and my aspirations as an artist and professional. Knowing I wasn’t alone in these struggles, I picked up my camera, seeking to connect with other households. I was hoping to find answers not only for myself but also for my daughters and my son. I was also looking for kinship.
Have you always wanted to explore the role of the modern woman?
My camera provides me with a way to connect meaningfully with other human beings. It also gives me a way to work through personal struggles and things I don’t understand.
With The Angel in the House, I was curious to see how modern women are faring—in other words, if we’d managed to kill the angel, or at least shoo her out the door. Virginia Woolf defied that calling––and she urged the rest of us to do the same.
My journey in this series taught me that Woolf’s warning remains as relevant today as it was in the early 20th century—not such a surprise, especially given how the devastation of the pandemic year highlighted how so many women were left handling everything on the home front. For me, the pictures my collaborators and I created reflect the complexities of this insight; the ways in which our domestic spheres define us, for better and for worse.
How did you find your subjects?
My subjects for The Angel in the House are my friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances. I really wanted this series to be authentic, and that led me to invite my subjects to become my collaborators in a process that I call “photo improv.” The biggest challenge in creating photos in this way and the most meaningful part was building the trust required to create each visual metaphor. Over many cups of coffee, glasses of wine, phone calls, emails, and texts, my collaborators and I engaged in deep conversations, often over several months, about our lives. I dug into the ways in which they arranged their physical spaces, the objects they hold dear, the cluttered bookshelves, the children’s rooms. Slowly the prompt for the picture emerged. Then, working together, we turned their home or garden or rooftop or backyard into a stage, moving set pieces, adding props, selecting wardrobe. My collaborators became actors acting out their own lives, hoping to reveal some truth about their lives and relationships. What was revealed was always something none of us could have planned, or scripted.
What do you want the viewer to learn or think about in regards to this series?
That while every Angel has her own unique and nuanced story, collectively what was revealed was clear: the angel in the house is still very much alive -- in fact, she hasn’t much budged. As the pandemic experience has made all too clear, women continue to play an outsized role holding our families and communities together.
I know I’m grateful for you capturing the daunting responsibilities that women juggle each day, especially during the pandemic…I’m curious what kind of response/reactions you’ve gotten from women after they see these images?
“I know that person— she’s me!” I hear that a lot. Women’s responses tend to be gratitude for my subjects’ honesty and vulnerability and recognition that the angel in the house is still very much alive. They laugh, they grimace, they shake their heads. In contrast, men often are surprised by what they see! For me that’s eye-opening and explains a lot.
The Angel in the House book available for purchase.
Much Love,
-SG