Carmen and Ivette
In December 2024, in an attempt to metabolise her grief after losing her mother, photographer Raven B. Varona began a new personal project documenting the unique relationships held between mothers and daughters. “Mom,Me” is a portrait of self-discovery and shared identity, offering a poetic meditation on love, legacy and the ties that bind us. She tells Gem Fletcher what it was like to capture these intimate moments and how, as a result, she felt closer to her own mom.
Bronx-born photographer and director Raven B. Varona has collaborated with many cultural icons over the last decade, from Beyonce to Adele, Nas to Cardi B. While she’s at home amongst the charge of music, performance and fame, the profound loss of her mother, Leigh, in 2023 offered her a significant reflection point in her life and work.
“I needed to do something for myself,” Varona recalls when I ask about the genesis of “Mom,me.” “I wanted a space to really create and release my grief. As an artist, my relationship with my mom was very co-dependent. She was my biggest cheerleader. She made me believe that I could do anything. Losing her was a mirror for me to start asking important questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? How do I want to exist in this creative work? For a long time, I had my own personal existential problem with defining my work. Despite all I had achieved, I didn’t really feel like I fit a niche. On reflection, this moment became pivotal for me. I had to challenge myself to show up, and life turned out to be the best teacher.”
She was my biggest cheerleader. She made me believe that I could do anything.
Varona began “Mom,Me” with no fixed idea of where it might go. She just followed her instinct to spend time with other mothers and daughters, giving herself the permission to see what would happen in that introspective place. She began with family friends from the Bronx, who were neighbors for most of her life. There she photographed four generations of women in a tiny kitchen in the heart of the home. Surrounding their matriarchal grandmother Carmen, three women stand together with their hair in rollers, conjuring ideas about the rituals we pass on.
From that moment, word spread about the project, and Varona went on to photograph sixteen other families across the United States. In contrast to her celebrity work, the images were completely stripped back. Each family chose the location for the shoot; typically somewhere special or meaningful to them like the home, church or their local park. The women wore their own clothes; Varona’s simple brief was to “be themselves and be comfortable.” In one frame, a family sits together in their church in Alabama. In another a young mom is bathed in sunlight as she holds her new daughter while pumping milk. “It was crucial for me to really be in their space,” explains Varona. “I wanted the work to be true to them, so when they looked back on it, years from now, it reflected what their world looked like and they felt their true selves were immortalized in that moment.”
As you get older, your relationship with your mother changes… You begin to see her multitudes.
While “Mom,Me” is not autobiographical, it’s rooted in the discoveries born from Varona’s relationship with her mother, both in the life they shared and the realizations that followed her passing. “My mom was the black sheep of her family,” she says. “She grew up in the age of hippies and the Vietnam War. She went to the first Woodstock. She had my brother when she was 19. She was just really punk and rebellious, which I am the opposite of in many ways. She had me in her 30s, and for the most part, it was just the two of us, as my brother joined the army. We grew up really poor in the Bronx, living in a one-bedroom apartment, until I was 27 and could afford a two-bedroom. The home was this really intimate yet polarising space. There was no world that I had without my mom, and my mom almost had no life other than taking care of me. My dreams and my career were her passions. She poured all of that energy into me.”
Towards the end of her life, Leigh was in and out of hospital and Varona spent that time desperately learning everything she didn’t know about her mom. She came to understand the nuances and complexity of her life, the loss, grief and repercussions that Leigh was contending with, alongside the joy, love and devotion she had experienced as her daughter.
Varona jokes that “Mom,Me” is an embodiment of the “your mom’s just a girl” meme and to some degree she’s right. At first glance, the work is relational, documenting how mothers and daughters connect and spend time together, while providing visual evidence of how each generation physically imprints onto the next. Push deeper and an intricate web of connections between motherhood and womanhood begins to reveal itself. “As you get older, your relationship with your mother changes,” says Varona. “Regardless of what that bond looked like when you were young, it shifts. You begin to see her multitudes, realizing that she is also a woman, who makes mistakes and is just figuring life out, just like you.”
What started as a space to release grief became Varona’s greatest personal and professional affirmation. In following her instinct to move between forms, she unravelled something more urgent, emotional and true. “Initially, when I lost my mom, you have all these big feelings, but over time you begin to unlock these little survival strategies, cultivating things inside yourself that you used to seek out in someone else,” she says. “I’ve alchemised that energy in an empowering way, and in return, I feel closer to my mom.”
