Mother and Child

Woman and child at a Horse Festival in Tagong, Kham, Tibet

Artists have been depicting the special bond between mothers and their children for hundreds of years.

Nepal

Loikaw, Myanmar/Burma

Germany

Zagreb, Croatia

Kham, Tibet

Relationships can be difficult to describe, and sometimes an image tells the story better than words. Painters from the Renaissance to the Impressionists to Mary Cassat, Diego Rivero, Van Gogh, and Picasso each depict something special and unique about motherhood. One of the most powerful and unforgettable photos depicting a mother and her children in the history of photography, is Dorothea Lange’s photograph of a destitute mother and her children taken in 1936.

Dorothea Lange said in an interview about the picture, “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.”

Montenegro

Vietnam

Afghanistan

“Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime…”
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 3

Ghazni, Afghanistan

Mumbai, India

Kamdesh, Afghanistan

Kabul, Afghanistan

A woman waits at the gate of presidential palace to inquire about her missing son who had been a soldier in the Afghan Army

“A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.”
- Agatha Christie