Mama Love

Hideka Tonomura (1979)

Visual account of a daughter capturing her mother’s love affair to explore hidden aspects of family life, female desire, and the mother’s assertion of autonomy.

Description

Created in Japan around 2007, Hideka Tonomura’s Mama Love chronicles her mother’s extramarital relationship in a deeply intimate photographic series. Marking Tonomura’s debut in the photographic world, the project provides an unfiltered glimpse into her family's hidden dynamics, particularly spotlighting the complicated interplay of desire, autonomy, and secrecy.

Mama Love emerges against the backdrop of Japan’s highly patriarchal society, challenging prevailing narratives by foregrounding female sexuality and personal agency. At a time when women were often positioned in submissive roles within both society and photographic representation, Tonomura's choice to visually represent her mother's affair openly defied established norms. The work not only confronts taboos surrounding sexuality and infidelity but also engages in broader societal conversations regarding women's rights and independence, resonating deeply with ongoing shifts in cultural perceptions of gender and family structures.

Artistically, Tonomura captures intimate scenes between her mother and her lover, obscuring the latter entirely through deliberate darkroom techniques. By burning the male figure into blackness, she redirects the viewer’s focus toward her mother’s emotional presence, emphasizing an act of personal rebellion and a reclaiming of autonomy after years of marital control. This technical intervention becomes a symbolic gesture, translating the emotional weight of her mother’s experience into visual form. At the same time, the act of witnessing and documenting her mother’s experience became a transformative moment of recognition, revealing a buried tenderness and the unspoken bond between them.

Published as mama 恋 love (Akaaka, 2008; new editions by Zen Foto Gallery, 2021), the project has been exhibited internationally—most notably in Love Songs at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2022), which also acquired works from the series. Related presentations include Shikijo: Eroticism in Japanese Photography (2016–18) and 10/10: Celebrating Contemporary Japanese Women Photographers at KYOTOGRAPHIE (2022).

Behind the work

A later 2021 edition of the Mama Love photobook includes a new color section, shot on 8mm film and transferred via telecine, offering a nostalgic tone that some may see as distinct from the original black-and-white series focused on the mother’s affair.

Quotes by the photographer

"Hate, betrayal, the photographs tell you it’s all love in the end."

"My mother’s affair was an act of sudden revenge because she was suffering from my father’s violence for a long time and also had stage four stomach cancer—she wanted to retrieve her own self as a woman. I was there to witness the affair so I became her accomplice. But what I found was the love between me and my mother in the photographs. For the first time in my life, after looking closely at the photographs, I realised that I am loved by my mother."

"Our lives were being controlled. My mother never had any freedom. Her first protest against my father was the love affair."

"In the darkroom, I burnt in the man to black. What drove my mother to have an affair was the darkness she had endured for so long, not the man. She had an affair with the darkness. As I discovered this, in a frenzy I burnt the man into black determined to express the darkness facing my mother."

"I wanted to create a space in which readers can question what a family really is again. After all, family is the first and smallest institution that a child experiences."

Tags and context

Credits: Zen Foto Gallery (image source); Linda Zhengová (project nomination). Suggest an Edit