Mother And Child Coffee Table Book

Most portrait books ask you to look. This one also hands you the sitter's own account of what you are looking at, printed on the same spread rather than exiled to an essay at the back.

Assouline's Mother and Child collects Claiborne Swanson Frank's portraits of 70 mothers across 280 pages, each of them interviewed about what motherhood actually means to her as well as photographed. That pairing is the whole structure. Swanson Frank shot each family, then put the same questions to every mother, and the answers sit beside the picture, which means the reader gets the version the subject would give and the version the camera gives, side by side, and can notice where the two disagree. Her sitters include Carolina Herrera, Aerin Lauder, Lauren Santo Domingo, Patti Hansen, Delfina Figueras and Anne Vyalitsyna. Over 100 illustrations fill the run.

The photographer came to it sideways. Raised in San Francisco, she moved to New York in 2007 and worked at Vogue under Anna Wintour, left the magazine in 2009 and started shooting, and made her name with a set of portraits of the women in her own life that became American Beauty in 2012. Young Hollywood followed in 2014.

Mother and Child, published in April 2018, is the third, photographed while she was working with the Japanese skincare house Cle de Peau Beaute. A companion volume, Father and Child, covers the other half of the subject, and Assouline sells the two together as a set.