This was taken in the winter, a few months after my daughter’s birth in August 2020. It was during the Covid pandemic. I didn’t have any work and my anxiety levels were very high. I was isolated and my family couldn’t be there for me. It was just me and my child at home. That October, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. My health visitor prompted me to start therapy. I hadn’t picked up a camera for months and didn’t know where to begin. My therapist suggested I document how I was feeling by writing – but I chose photography. This was the first image I took, and the genesis of a series. To me, my gaze is the longing for home, for community – and for myself. I was lost in that moment, struggling with self-identity, but I also had hope that the light in my heart would come back.
What I see in the image now is a resilient mother: a woman who has a voice and who, despite everything that’s going on, wants to bring something to life. I hoped another mother would connect with it, that it might save someone else who was going through the same thing.
The bedroom setting came to me naturally. That room was my sanctuary, my place to hide and bury my head in my pillow and cry. It was where I would breastfeed and take care of my daughter. Making images in that space, telling my story, was how I pulled myself out of depression. I think it also shows how women can do anything from the home – you can do great things, even from such a small space. When one of the photographs from the series, titled Care, appeared on billboards around the UK, mothers would reach out to me and say they felt seen and represented.
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, I had seen my own mother and our community of women there, raising their children. Those images were in my subconscious. I grew up in a very religious house – my father was a bishop – so I was exposed to a lot of images of the Madonna and child. Later, when I relocated to Britain, I went to the National Portrait Gallery in London and saw a lot of artworks on this theme. All that visual language wrote itself in my memory.
This photograph and the series came to define my style. Not only was it a way for me to shed the pain and heal, it has also led me to advocate for the stories of other Black mothers. It won the Leica Women Foto Project award, which has allowed me to make more images themed around motherhood, and to explore postpartum depression more deeply. The next phase is to shed light on the stigma and shame surrounding the condition in the Black community. Black mothers are often not taken seriously, nor offered emotional support. They can also be soft, pure, vulnerable. We have strength but we don’t always need to be strong – we can have help. Men see themselves in this image, too. When I presented my work at an art fair recently, one man told me that, after seeing it, he called his mother, having not done so for a very long time. That touched my heart.
I’m currently documenting what truly happened to me at that time. I didn’t have the strength to do it before. I focused on the joys, the struggle, my routine at home. But now I can face what really happened and not be afraid any more.
Dola Posh’s CV
Born: Lagos, Nigeria, 1991
Trained: Self-taught
Influences: “My culture as a Yoruba woman, stories of Black motherhood and nature.”
High point: “Winning the Leica award in 2024”
Low point: “My isolation and postpartum depression during Covid”
Top tip: “Don’t let our noisy world shift your gaze from what your heart chooses”
• See more work at dolaposh.com
