In Close Kin, Belgian photographer Joke De Wilde turns her camera towards the intimate, ordinary world of her own family. Photographing her four children as they grow, the camera becomes both a way of being present and of stepping outside the routines of motherhood — allowing her to simply observe, witness and see.

Her photographs embrace the contradictions of family life: beauty and mess, closeness and solitude, tenderness and frustration, holding on and letting go. Never staged, the images form an evolving archive of childhood and motherhood, elevating fleeting everyday moments into something universal and timeless.

At its heart, Close Kin is about the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary — and our desire to hold on to what is already passing.

About the artist

Joke De Wilde is a Belgian photographer, born in 1990 and based in Antwerp. She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. She works on an ongoing series Close Kin in which she documents her family as a mother of four.

Joke’s photographic work touches upon an ambivalence that lives within us all. A recognition of opposites meeting in parenthood, kinship, and within ourselves.
A visual momentum that both allows us to flee and returns us to the moment as it unfolds.

It is valuable and beyond use.
It is fulfilling and empty.
It is beautiful and ugly.
It is together and alone.
It is lonely and held.
It is hard, yet unquestionable.

jokedewilde.com