Angela Hill’s Emotional Portrait of Her Daughter’s Adolescence

This time last year, IDEA co-founder Angela Hill had just released the independent publisher’s most personal publication to date: the first book of her own photography. Titled Sylvia, the tender tome documented its subject’s adolescence with such close familiarity and understanding that many assumed that Sylvia Mann was Angela’s daughter. She wasn’t. But Edith Owen is. 

For her second book, Edith, Hill’s camera becomes the instrument of a mother’s gaze as she photographs her invariably reluctant model Edith with equal parts curiosity and adoration. “A lot of people looking at my Instagram think pictures of Edith are of Sylvia and vice versa,” says Hill. “They both have an extremely strong perspective and are the most diplomatic, peace-loving individuals I have ever met. I became very motherly towards Sylvia and recently went back to shoot her after a 12-year gap; it was like we were in the middle of a sentence, never to be finished.”

Edith, like Sylvia, spans two decades of a young woman’s life but, again, centres around the teenage years when Edith would be Hill’s first choice of model. “Edith has always had an extremely strong sense of style,” Hill tells AnOther. “She was choosing her own carefully coordinated outfits at a very early stage. But she also has this other magical ingredient I need in my models; in that they have no idea of their own beauty or elegance. She took over as my new model and muse when I had stopped photographing Sylvia and have carried on until very recently.”

Naturally, Hill found Sylvia much easier to work with; there was a level of politeness that doesn’t always exist with one’s children. There are plenty of instances in Edith where Hill’s efforts are met with evident displeasure – Edith awkwardly turns from the camera, her gaze on her boots, or confronts it with a furrowed brow – yet this works to the image’s advantage, making for a wholly truthful depiction of a mother-daughter relationship navigating the rocky trials of adolescence.

“Every single shoot with Edith starts out with her in a foul mood, monosyllabic and reluctant. Often monetary bribes take place, and she places a time limit on me – I shoot on an egg timer basically, whilst clearing out my bank account,” the photographer recalls. “There was one time where we went to a bird sanctuary in Essex, not speaking all the way. We started doing the photographs and I couldn’t help but become very emotional as my father used to take me to bird reserves every weekend when I was young. I remember never wanting to go so he would bribe me with promises of buying all my favourite sweets my mother wouldn’t allow. As I started crying that day, Edith melted slowly, and I was able to get some wonderful shots.”

Although several of the photographs were originally shot for editorials, the hallmarks of Hill’s raw style and elegant proficiency in simplicity are most striking in pictures of Edith at home in her bedroom, on the train or wrapped up in the wilderness. Always shot on 35mm film without hair and makeup, lighting or retouching, the photographs have a cinematic quality, presented as a series of film stills from a bildungsroman. To guide this, Hill drinks deep from a well of filmmakers most notably echoing the poignant framing of Wim Wenders Paris, Texas and RW Fassbinder as well as the subdued palette of Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children.

“I have a lot of equivocal thoughts about how many shoots the world needs, so for me these images need to have a deeper meaning. I always shoot Edith in places that are very close to my heart; locations that I used to visit as a child with my father. His inquisitive nature took us on family holidays in his VW Beetle through the Scottish Highlands, Cornwall, Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk. With every model I photograph, I take them back to these sites and explain all of this to them. They become a character in this ‘film’ of sorts that I’m creating.”

With Edith, Hill perfectly realises the photographic impulse to observe, understand and memorialise. Cossetted in a scratchy woollen jumper, the book is a dedication of unbounded, persistent love, uniquely shared between mother and daughter.

Edith by Angela Hill is published by IDEA, and is out now.