Most new mothers experience a profound shift in identity. For Madeline Morlet, the shift was especially pronounced. When she was six months pregnant, she moved from London, where she was shooting and producing regularly for publications such as Vice and i-D, to Rockland, the small town in mid-coastal Maine where her husband had grown up. She didn’t have a formal job, or any friends. She suddenly found herself with the space and time urban dwellers often say they crave, but are terrified to actually confront.
“Something about having all of this space and time pushed me into taking a different kind of picture from what I was taking before,” Morlet says. “Whereas before, someone would approach me to shoot for a publication, in Maine, my work was very much self-driven. I didn’t know how to work in that way at first.”
She began with self-portraits of herself and her partner, naked in the woods. “The girl I had hired had known my husband for a long time,” she laughed. Even despite the guts it took to take the photographs, they weren’t a success. “From that series of pictures, there was only one that I really loved.”
Morlet tried self-portraiture again, this time with a pregnant friend, and found herself unsatisfied again with the results. Then, she began to dig deep into her educational background — Morlet studied classics and English at Kings College London — to look for inspiration. In doing so, Morlet examined what had originally given her a sense of self worth — her intelligence. She also arrived at a time when she had felt similarly isolated and unsure of her future — her teenage years.
“When I lived in a city I thought I was an introvert because I spent so much time with people, and I was constantly exhausted,” she says. “That removal of daily social interaction made me acknowledge that I’m an extrovert. It was a return to adolescence, when I also felt I needed to make and build friendships.”
Morlet began making mood boards, and planning out elaborate staged shoots. She leaned on a variety of cultural and historical references to inform her narratives, including The Crucible by Arthur Miller, The Secret History by Donna Tartt and the television series Dawson’s Creek, all of which capture, in varying degrees, the exquisite discomfort of being a teenage girl in America.
Drawing on her background in editorial photography, Morlet began putting together teams of local teenage models, wardrobe stylists and other creative to stage shots. “It was so fulfilling to be in this community where I felt very isolated, and to have this means to engage with other people who I wouldn’t have met otherwise,” she says.
Over the course of a year, she produced three shoots, all with different narrative arcs. “After the first shoot, I looked at every shoot as an episode or short story, a different pastiche of references that aided me visually,” she says. “At first, I thought I would present them as individual series, but as I continued to shoot, I found that showing the individual series was less important than showing the characters again and again in different scenarios. There were all of these landscapes in one area, and that became the overriding narrative.”
Then, a local gallery, Dowling Walsh, offered Morlet a solo exhibition that ran from September 6 —28, 2019. The impending show kicked Morlet into gear over the summer. She shot continuously to arrive at the series “I Promise I’ll Never Forget,” which serves as a sort of love letter to youth unconstrained by time. Shots of young women in white gowns that resemble the nightgowns of Puritans in 17th century New England are combined with shots of girls in modern day prep school uniforms. A woman in a sweater set blowing a cigarette out of the window of a manicured house could be from the 1950s, or she could be from the now. Boys dressed up like characters in a Shakespeare play could also be time travelers from the Mayflower. Overall, there’s an exquisite sense in the series that what has happened before in this place — coastal Maine — will happen again and again, throughout history. The series reinforces the human condition, and especially the beauty and angst that accompanies transitioning from a child to an adult.
Morlet’s daughter just turned two, and she is thoroughly entrenched in the community where she was born. For now, Morlet plans to continue to add to the series “I Promise I’ll Never Forget,” with plans to show it more in the future. This fall, for example, she plans to shoot a group of redheads in an apple orchard. “I think there’s a lot more fluidity to how I approach the stories because the history of the edit is already there to give weight to the project,” she says.
To learn more about Morlet’s work, visit her website, or follow her on Instagram.
Below is a selection of images from “I Promise I’ll Never Forget.” All images © Madeline Morlet.
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