When Michele met John and invited him into her family, life changed for her daughter Ashley and the tight-knit clique she’d grown used to. Now 27, Ashley is a photographer and uses the medium to explore these complicated feelings. “John has been in my life since I was 15, but we didn’t have a profound relationship,” Ashley says. “It was more just like having love for each other, but we don’t talk about serious things.” Her new photo series, Weekends with My Mother and Her Lover, considers this dynamic and helps her “get a little bit closer with my stepdad,” she says.
Weekends started on a whim for Ashley’s Advanced Track program at the International Center of Photography in New York. But she grew more and more invested in the story, travelling from New York to Ohio, her mom and stepdad’s home, weekend after weekend, thinking up and staging new dynamics for the three of them to improvise and photograph. “We just created a list of photos that I would want to shoot,” she says. “I would write down ‘mom in background,’ ‘John lifting weight,’ ‘me looking at him,’ and I just went with that.”
Ashley kept her parents in the dark about what the project was for. On a conceptual level, she sought to showcase the intimate connotations of having a stepfather at an adult age and looking at her mother as a sexual being, but her parents caught on to their daughter’s deliberate and playful staging. “I didn’t know what Ashley’s vision was because she didn’t share with us what she wanted to do. We were both happy to be a part of her visual work with just one rule: I keep my clothes on in the backyard,” Michele tells me.
In one photo, Ashley asked her parents to take a bite of an apple at the same time. In another, she told her mom to wear a bra and underwear for a bed shot. A moment of hesitation might have flashed on her parents’ faces, but they never lost their complete trust in their daughter. “We’ve never done anything like that with so little tentative, especially with Ashley,” John says. “She comes up with some crazy shit!”
Ashley learned about parts of her mom and stepdad she didn’t realise were there. She already knew that her relationship with her mom was intense and deep. There were times when she had to take a step back and view her mom as an outside person who was in love with a guy that came late into her life. “I was able to see the more sensual and intimate side of her,” she says. “It made me a bit more forgiving of her since I was able to see her as someone who has a colourful dating history and learned how to move through those and use them as ways to strengthen herself for her right partner.”
Ashley visually replayed her childhood in a subversive kind of way. After setting up her camera, she jumped over John, kneeling on the grass on all fours. She sat in a beach chair, watching her mom and stepdad play twister on the grass. She lay in the front yard behind her parents while her mom fed her a peach. Her mother watched her watch John ascend a ladder. Perhaps the most intimate image in the series has her spying on John by the window of a toolshed as he puts his hand above her mom’s chest.
The themes of familiar and foreign family dynamics emerge in Ashley’s works. Michele is captured as a woman with a grown-up daughter and a new marriage. John is depicted as a diplomatic man who swerves from conflicts and offers passive comfort. Bringing her parents together for a project made Ashley realise her parents balance each other out. “He is so patient with her and is afraid of conflict. When she stirs the pot, he doesn’t go in there with her. He also cracks dad jokes, and my mom loves to laugh at dumb stuff. She finally found her perfect match.”
Credits
All images courtesy Ashley Markle