When I became a mom, it was exactly as they said: love at first sight. It was an intense, protective, mamma-bear love that gave me a completely new outlook on life. I remember holding my one-day-old son and looking out the window toward Chicago, thinking about the developing racial tensions across the city. A few months earlier, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer. In the following months, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and Philando Castile would join the ranks of Black men killed by police. As I held my newborn, hormones blazing, all I could think of was that they were a mother’s precious son. 

As a photographer and new mom, I wanted to do something to explore racism beyond words thrown into social media echo chambers. I could read all the books about what it meant to be Black in America, but I didn’t have the first clue what it was actually like. I could, however, identify with motherhood as a bridge for learning and building empathy.

When I step into a mother’s space, my fundamental role is to ask questions, listen intently, and capture honest and powerful imagery. As both images and quotes are displayed together, I want viewers to see the commonalities that these sixteen mothers share as well as the nuance of each story. The hope is to bring people together across racial divides, to do the hard-but-necessary work of acknowledging overt and covert racism and work together to shift the collective consciousness of race in America. 

The images captured were taken between 2017 and 2021 in both the Chicago and Cleveland areas. They are shared in black and white because the love a mother has for her son is just that- timeless, true, and unfading. At the same time, removing color from an image does not remove bias. Blackness in America has implications and color blindness is not an option. My goal is both to connect viewers to the universal reality of motherhood and home in on the specific challenges of mothering a Black son, with the hope of restoring human dignity and care for the Black males in our society.

-Sharon Hughes