平川典俊

Noritoshi Hirakawa

Identical mother and daughter sharing one ego

A mother and daughter, who have swapped clothes, pose for a photo together at home. The mother is wearing the clothes her daughter wears on dates with her boyfriend, and the daughter is wearing the clothes her mother wears when she goes to bed with her husband at night. At first glance, what is immediately felt is a sense of unease that pervades the scene, unsettling the viewer. However, this is not due to their mismatched attire or the feeling of peeking into someone else's home. What these series of photographs capture at their core is not the mother and daughter themselves, nor the house they live in, but the presence of an "invisible other sex" that possesses them all. For the daughter, it is her father as a sexual being, unimaginable from his daytime persona. For the mother, it is her daughter's boyfriend, who is (supposedly) young and handsome. "By integrating with her daughter, the mother attempts to regain lost youth and desire. By integrating with her mother, the daughter unconsciously seeks to touch the 'adult man' she craves," Hirakawa states. "Modern mothers and daughters sometimes share a single ego. Freud discovered the Oedipus complex and issues of the ego, but if he were alive today, he would undoubtedly have spoken of the identification between mother and daughter, and the shared ego or its interchangeability that results from it."