Motherhood at the Amon Carter

The subject of motherhood runs the course of art history, from the Madonna and child paintings of the Renaissance . . .

. . . to the great images of motherhood in the Amon Carter's collection.

Though this may look like a child attacking its mother, in the nineteenth century “bo-peep” referred to the non-sinister game of peek-a-boo!

She bought an old house in New Hampshire that lacked the conveniences of running water and electricity.

She constructed a deliberately pre-modern lifestyle for her family, focusing on life's simple pleasures. She documented their lives with her camera, emphasizing moments of beauty and harmony.

The death of her daughter Elizabeth in 1954 prompted Dorr to publish the photographs in what would become her most acclaimed book of the six she produced, *Mother and Child."

Unlike her contemporaries—whose documentary photographs captured the horrors of war, social injustice, and general strife—Dorr focused on the painterly aspects of rural life, a life she had constructed. 

Dorr’s body of work about motherhood is a nostalgic celebration of the simplicities of life and a reminder of the beauty found in the acts of everyday living in the face of very difficult moments in her life.