In the summer of 2019, Polly Braden began photographing the daily texture of single parenthood across the United Kingdom. Braden is herself a single parent, and that position shapes the work: the pictures follow routine rather than spectacle, attending to improvisation and endurance in ordinary rooms. A sitting room remade as a bedroom so a child can have space of their own; the compounded roles of sole earner, teacher and playmate; the solitude that runs alongside affection. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2022, the book gathers fifty-six photographs in colour and black and white across ninety-six pages, accompanied by texts from Sally Williams and Claire-Louise Bennett.
The subject is neither marginal nor exotic. One in four British families is headed by a single parent, and roughly ninety per cent of those are single mothers, yet the wider culture still assumes a two-parent norm. Braden’s portraits take that contradiction as their ground. Her sitters are not offered as case studies or symbols; they are individuals photographed with sustained attention, and the accumulated sequence makes room for the full register of the experience, from exhaustion and anger to pride, humour and love.
The book’s proportions reinforce its method. At roughly seventeen by twenty-four centimetres, with a softback binding and jacket, it sits easily in the hand, an intimate scale suited to photographs made at close range over time. The combination of colour and black-and-white images prevents the series from settling into a single visual key, allowing domestic warmth and harder-edged observation to coexist. The texts by Williams and Bennett extend the frame without displacing the photographs.
For collectors of contemporary British documentary photography, the book is a considered example of long-form work made from within its subject rather than at a remove from it. Braden’s attention to the practical and emotional labour of raising children alone gives the series a coherence that is hard to fake. What stays is the quality of looking: patient, unsentimental and alert to the ordinary arrangements through which families hold together.
