Ania Moussawel, The Days are Long – Portfolio Competition Winner

When I was thirty-four years old, I became a mom; my daughter was born and like the saying goes, nothing was the same again. Like most working artist moms, finding the balance between work and home, and a creative practice was very challenging, but I found a way to produce art again and those life events left an imprint on the work that followed. My photographic series, “The Days are Long”, examines the complex relationship between mother and daughter over generations in my family.  The title of the series comes from the saying, “The days are long, but the years are short”. Meant to be words of comfort for overwhelmed parents, I heard or read some version of this phrase often after becoming a mom.

The images in this body of work center around my grandmother, mother, daughter, and myself.  My family is from Cuba and Lebanon.  Like a lot of immigrant families, the women in my family have responsibilities that are intrinsic to their roles as mothers including providing, caregiving, and upholding traditions from their native countries. Although our experiences have changed from generation to generation, the way these responsibilities have shaped our identity have remained.