Emma Hardy made this photo on the way home from the school run one February morning in Suffolk. She had dropped her elder two children at their schools and was nearly home, with her younger daughter, too young for school, still in the car.
There was something about the light and the morning and the high grasses that excited her, though. Driving home, she says, “I was so glad to see that the strange weather combination of frost and fog, usually mutually exclusive, was still holding. I’d noticed it on the way to school, but to make my kids late for the sake of a photo wasn’t something I could do; we were usually running late anyway.” But there was still time. “I had my camera with me, and my youngest daughter’s coat was perfectly in chorus with the frost and the foggy sky.” She took the picture.
There are many moments like this in Hardy’s new book, Permissions, a collection of transcendent images in which the lives of her family – mostly her mother and her children – often seem to become a magical part of the landscapes around them. Some of them are little captured epiphanies of domestic joy, some of them stolen glimpses of vulnerability, some of them, like this one, beautifully surreal interludes in crowded days. “As a photographer,” Hardy says, “while also a full-time mother to three young children, I always wanted to be ready and open to images that presented themselves, unbeckoned. Like the world showing me something I wished to see but didn’t know until I saw it. That was very often how it went, those early days of young motherhood: one eye on my children, one eye scanning the world around me, one hand ready for my camera, the other close by my heart.”
Permissions by Emma Hardy is published next month by Gost (£40). An exhibition of the project will be on display at 10 14 Gallery, London N16, from 1 December 2022 to 27 January 2023
