“Mothers and daughters! Are there any fantasies or ideal images left to us in this tough-minded age of psychological realism?” So begins the historian Estelle Jussim’s essay for Aperture’s Summer 1987 issue, “Mothers & Daughters,” a catalog in magazine form that accompanied a traveling exhibition of photographs about mother-daughter relationships. “That Special Quality,” the suggestive subtitle offers—is it a definition or a dare? The issue is organized neither chronologically nor typologically. It’s not ethnographic or sentimental. Yet “Mothers & Daughters” relies on both of photography’s elemental impulses: the desire to see others and the desire to memorialize. There are lines of poetry by Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and Alice Walker. There are backyards, weddings, beaches, kitchens, embraces, American flags, sashes that read “Votes for Women,” looks of impatience, and gazes for posterity.
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