At thirteen, Hady Barry became responsible for three younger siblings, the youngest only seven, after the family fled civil war in Côte d’Ivoire and arrived in Senegal in November 2002. Her mother soon left for the United States to seek asylum for herself and her children; three years passed before they met again. Their father was largely absent, traveling frequently for work. Barry describes not only overwhelming adolescent responsibility but the absence of both parents, leaving an abandonment she still carries awkwardly in adulthood. The book is her attempt to process complex feelings toward her mother: an unsteady mix of hurt, resentment, admiration, and love.
The work interweaves documentary photography, archival family images, journal entries, and transcribed conversations with her mother. Rather than a chronology of events, the book assembles contradictory registers—evidentiary, diaristic, conversational—so that a relationship cannot be reduced to a single perspective. Across 96 pages and measuring 16.5 × 23 cm, the book was designed, printed, and bound by Barry herself. The limited first edition of 100 was printed and bound by her hand and produced over ten weeks during the Penumbra Foundation Risograph Residency. These production conditions make the book a physical extension of a personal reckoning.
For collectors, its significance rests on documented recognition and a defined physical form. i am (not) your mother received a Juror’s Special Mention at the 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards. It was on view at Paris Photo from 7–10 November 2024 and was scheduled to travel to Printed Matter in New York in January 2025. The edition is sold out. Barry is credited as photographer, and her control of design, printing, and binding places the book at the intersection of personal narrative and independent publishing. Its interleaving of photography, archival material, and text reflects the intimacy of the subject without resolving its tensions.
Barry’s approach matters because it allows the mother’s account to coexist with the daughter’s remembered hurt. The combination of family images and transcribed conversation invites readers to consider whose perspective a family archive preserves, and what it leaves unresolved. For a collection concerned with migration, care and intergenerational memory, this relationship between image and testimony offers a reason to return to the book beyond its initial award recognition.
