A MOTHER’S LOVING PORTRAITS: ROBIN SCHWARTZ
ROBIN SCHWARTZ
Since she was three years old, Amelia Paul Forman has been her mother’s muse. While most mothers in western culture have taken ooodles of photos of their children throughout their lives, Amelia’s mom Robin Schwartz, is an award-winning fine art photographer who has made this a personal project that has now been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world.
Schwartz’s photos of Amelia explore her relationships with animals. She’s taken beautiful portraits of Amelia, at various ages, as she’s posed and interacted with family pets, rescues, and other animals, including elephants, llamas, ponies, tigers, kangaroos, chimpanzees, dogs, and cats. All of the animals are real, live, animals. None are Photoshopped.
Amelia and the Animals is Schwartz’s second monograph, published by Aperture, featuring this collaborative series dedicated to documenting Amelia’s adventures among the animals. They offer a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication. They document a shared fantastic mother–daughter journey via their shared affinity for animals.
The journey began when Schwartz took 3-year-old Amelia to the circus, and watched her “fall in love: with a baby chimp named Ricky. "The two of them could not stop hugging," she says.
Schwartz proceeded to capture the love with her camera. It inspired Schwartz to continue photographing her daughter as she grew up and continued her relationships with her animal friends.
Mother and daughter became creative partners, planning the scenes. "We try to create a world where there is no line between humans and animals," says Schwartz.
“The world that my daughter and I explore is one where the line between human and animal overlaps or is blurred, where animals are part of our world and humans are part of theirs,” Schwartz tells us.
“Amelia and I play out our fantasies and explore our eccentricities to create a cultural space in the photographs where animals not only co-exist with humans, but also interact as full partners.”
Working as a professional photographer, Schwartz was often pressed by a whirlwind of work deadlines. Her work with the ongoing portraits of her daughter helped to create a unique bond between them. “In retrospect, this series represents the most significant era of my life, and became a lifeline to my child,” Schwartz says. “As Amelia matures, her collaboration with me enriches and expands this project.”
Amelia is now an aspiring biologist, who loves to write, draw, photograph and travel.
Schwartz’s latest series with Amelia, entitled “Swan Song,” features portraits of Emily, a 22-year old capuchin monkey, Babie, a 12-year old rescue macaque monkey, and their dogs, Ruby, a Whippet and Indie, a Chinese Crested.
Schwartz earned an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and a Ford Foundation Individual Artist Grant. Her photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, both New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others.
Schwartz’s photographs have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine LIGHTBOX, The New Yorker, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others.
Schwartz has taught at The International Center for Photography, New York City. She currently works as an assistant professor of photography at William Paterson University and lives in New Jersey with her husband, Robert Forman, daughter, Amelia, and their five companion animals.
Beyond her collaborative series with her daughter, Schwartz’s other works also feature animals. “Photographing animals and the people that are devoted to animals is what I have always cared about and the driving force in all my work,” she explains.
Now that Amelia is 18 years old, the mother-daughter relationship is entering a new phase. We can’t wait to see what comes next for them.
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