Regarding Emma

"Inspired by the birth of her daughter, Emma, and dedicated to her departed mother, Regarding Emma is a provocative collection of complex, allegorical images of girls and women and the mysterious world they inhabit."-Paul Brown, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Paul Brown Seattle Post-Intelligencer 20031001)

For more than fifteen years, Melissa Ann Pinney has been making photographs of girls and women, from infancy to old age, to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Her work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood--a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party--but the informal passages of girlhood: combing a doll's hair, doing laundry with a mother, smoking a cigarette at a state fair. With each view, we gain a greater understanding of the connections between mother and daughter, and by extension the larger world of family, friends, and society. Pinney's approach to interpreting girlhood became more complicated and complex when her daughter, Emma, was born eight years ago. Emma's childhood evoked in Pinney her own girlhood and gave her work new meaning and purpose. Ultimately, Regarding Emma shares with all of us the incremental and the ritualistic changes that take place in a woman's life over time. Her photographs are artistic and social documents that reveal the subtle and bold aspects of feminine identity--documents whose reach will extend well beyond the walls of America's leading galleries and museums into the hearts and homes of everyday Americans.