Blood Line

No matter how much we love our parents, there is a mix of emotions when suddenly, one day, we look in the mirror and see the faces of our mother or father reflected back at us. There is a similar wonder, beauty and terror in the realization that we have the power to pass on parts of ourselves to our own children. I believe that Anne-Laure Autin’s project ​“Bloodline” gets to the heart of this.

Autin began this body of work after finding out that her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The subjects of her images are her children. She photographs them as she contemplates her place in her ancestral line and comes to terms with her father’s passing. This cycle that Autin is describing is a phenomenon that many of us struggle with at some point in our lives. There are these particular moments in life where something causes a shift in the bedrock of who we are. Sometimes I imagine that there are these huge gears moving us from one role to another- we go from being the child to becoming the parent (the parents of our own children and the caretakers of our own parents as they age). To me, there is something comforting and terrifying about this circle- this arc drawn in blood, and bound by a twisting arch of DNA.

Autin situates the viewer in a unusual vantage point — we are witnessing an intensely personal view of her children. And while we assume that the images are taken in their home, the environment they are photographed in has the impersonal, clean and sterile feel of a hospital. The compositions are simple, and medical supplies that Autin stitches onto the paper’s surface add a strange form of elegance. These alterations are an interesting addition to the physical prints — as if she is trying to heal the image itself.

- Mia

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