Motherless Child

While photographing in Atlanta, Tanyth Berkeley found herself staying near Ponce de Leon Boulevard, where magnolias, forsythia, and wisteria bloomed alongside people who seemed, in her words, “beat up by life.” Drawn to the contrast between the flowers in bloom and the lives unfolding beneath them, she began making portraits of those she met. Among them was Lee, a man who, she recalls, “glowed.” Looking back on the work, she reflected that she had “begun with a different project in mind but then let the real chain of events tell the story.”

That evolution is reflected in the book’s structure. Its opening street portraits give way to a more intimate sequence that traces her life with Lee, reflecting her departure from the distance traditionally associated with documentary photography into something far more personal. She photographed Lee because he was “a muse and someone I loved,” seeing photography as “a way of holding on to people,” a collaboration, and a way of honoring a connection. Lee’s life, she writes, “had many stories to tell.” Over the next two years, the photographs remain rooted in the intimacy of their relationship, even as Lee’s life is gradually overtaken by what she has called a “slow unraveling.” Eventually, “his addiction was full blown and chaos ensued.” Yet the photographs never lose sight of the man she first encountered. “He treated me like I was someone he loved,” she writes. “To push that away is heartbreaking.”

Only years after their relationship ended did Berkeley realize that Lee had become, in part, “a surrogate” through whom she was trying to understand the father she lost to a drug overdose when he was twenty-three. The title, Motherless Child, comes from the spiritual that, in her words, “changes depending on who is singing it.” For her, Motherless Child came to embody the lasting effects of childhood trauma, the ways addiction shapes people’s lives, and how those histories have played out in her own.