Introducing Edith Maybin as featured in I don’t really know what kind of girl I am. curated by Jody Quon.
 
 

 
EDITH MAYBIN’s pictures adeptly summarize what it is to be a girl. She produces feminine, lingerie-drawer environments of a young girl in bright, jewel-tone sitting rooms, dressing rooms or bathrooms. Maybin captures domesticity at its most alluring and carefree. But these descriptions are culled from a first glance, and after closer inspection, the oddities begin to amass. Maybin’s subject is not just one person, but rather a blending of mother and daughter. She explains, “My pictures are made from my body and my daughter’s head.” The difference between the two is hard to distinguish. Her daughter’s face is young, but her expressions convey wisdom; and Maybin’s ballerina frame hardly looks like that of a mother. In the process, Maybin challenges the stereotypes of what mother and daughter should look like.
 
“I like capturing a performance, a relationship played out in front of the camera,” Maybin says. “At the moment, I find myself most often returning to the relationship of mother and daughter. I set up a few things and then I let the performance happen naturally and see what turns up on the photograph. They are experiments, really.”
 
Maybin cites Lady Clementina Hawarden, a British Victorian who made pictures with her daughters as an influence. She also references Jean-Martin Charcot, a 19th century French psychiatrist who induced hysterical states in women and made photographs. “These photographs are both beguiling and frightening at the same time,” she says. And then, for Maybin, there is Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. “The idea of reverie is something that I am curious about. It is an other-landscape.” Vermeer found this interesting as most of his women were occupied with something simple but appear elsewhere in thought. There is a paradox in how we appear and what we may be on the inside.”
 
—Tami Mnoian