The Depiction of Parenthood: the lies we’re all complicit in, and the photographers telling a more honest and diverse story

It begins with family albums; whether you're from the neat, faux leather-bound variety or the overflowing shoeboxes under the bed type, those nostalgic 6 x 4's are intrinsically the same. Moments of celebration, milestones, family gatherings all laced with a heady mix of cheshire cat grins and awkward forced smiles. While we look back on them with fondness, they seek to hide reality. The mess, the chaos, the pain and the struggle, have all been carefully buried and erased. Perhaps the most deceiving portrayal of family life is the one we are all complicit in.

As a relatively new parent, I'm still assimilating the parenthood paradox. A journey of empowerment, growth and joy that also sees the attrition of identity, epic self-sacrifice and boredom. The expectations and reality of parenthood can be wildly different, belonging in various ways to different identities. It's both uncontainable and unshareable in its complexity. It's physical and experiential, and sometimes beyond language. Our current vernacular is tied up in shame if we dare to speak freely. Phrases like “life-changing” feel pompous yet parenthood is a catalyst for a recalibration of every aspect of life as you know it.

For me, photography has always been a place to seek solace, a conduit for discovery and empathy. The beauty of the medium is its limitations; while it cannot capture the entirety of a subject, it excels in distilling moments of the human experience. In The Reluctant Father, Philip Toledano expresses the tension between how he felt becoming a father and the enormous cultural pressure to perform parenthood. The book charts the early years of his daughter Loulou's life as he showed up for her, but struggled to find an emotional connection. Catherine Opie crisscrossed the US in an RV for three months photographing lesbian families trying to figure out what domestic life for queer women was like as she moved towards her future as a mother. In Pia, Christopher Anderson portrays the father-daughter relationship, as he tries to stop time and appreciate every moment of the experience. Some of the most emotive work depicting parenthood comes from non-parents. Melissa Cana and Alexander Coggin capture an acute intimacy in the parental bond from very different perspectives. Artists have also used the medium to speak to the physical and emotional trauma of parenthood from Heji Shin’s bloody captures of the epic moment a baby’s head emerges from its mother, to Jon Henry’s Stranger Fruit, picturing black mothers and sons in a suspended embrace confronting the disarming violence Black men face daily. These works hold space with agency, power and care.

Parenthood is not one thing; it's many. Let's reclaim our ideas and experiences from corporate spaces and bring them to life in exciting and regenerative new ways. Depicting this universal experience in its entirety may be impossible, but as we continue to have more open and honest dialogues in spaces like this, it will embolden curiosity and create vital support for those of us stumbling through trying to figure it all out.

Toby Kaufmann, creative director at Facebook.

I don't think it's possible to represent parenthood in an image. Parenting is this long race and photographs are just moments. In culture, the portrayal of parenthood has no depth — nothing which speaks to how great or how challenging it is.

As kids grow up, parenthood is in some ways easier, but in many ways harder. I'm raising a white upper-middle-class man. My focus right now is teaching him how to shirk his privilege and how to help other people and make that a daily practice. I think about whether my kid is consuming the right content and media for him to grow up as a functioning member of society. There is so much that people don't talk about and I still don't understand why that is. As children get older, complex conversations are missing – everything from emotional health to crucial dialogues around how you teach consent. You have to take a small child and start educating them in relation to how you want an adult man to act. It's a tough one. You're responsible for the future.

Kalpesh Lathigra, photographer

For me, my reference point for parenthood was split into two camps, popular culture and eastern philosophy (a strict discipline informed by religious or spiritual text like the Bhagavad Gita). In reality, films are fiction, books are subjective, and the daily grind of life plays havoc with your eastern ideas. Yet, parenthood affected me in the best way. Being a parent is singularly the hardest thing I've ever done, but I always think the one thing I got right. The rest of life is a constant minefield.

Capturing the reality of parenthood is so subjective and charged by personal experience. Often, it's the sheer mental exhaustion of parenting and the internal battle of being a parent that is lacking. I struggle immensely with being a father and that idea of what it means to have this rich and profound connection with your kids. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a portrayal of the bond between parent and child that stays with me. In essence, it's a love story.