Mimi explores the cultural assumptions embedded in the label grandmother.

I know the loneliness of societal labeling. I have been named mother, wife, widow, grandmother—titles that shaped me but also tried to contain me. Each change brought a sense of unease: a picture of how the world thinks I should appear that rarely matches how I feel. It takes time to inhabit a new title. In that liminal space, we can feel unmoored, searching for who we are while the world decides for us.

Becoming a grandmother was both profound and full of joy—yet I struggled with how strangers respond when they hear the word. It arrives heavy with age, invisibility, and expectation—ideas that do not fit how I live or see myself.

Curious, I asked artificial intelligence to show me a grandmother in 2025. It returned solitary women: faces in shadow, stripped of context, surrounded by silence—implying loneliness. But being a grandmother is not inherently lonely. It carries love, lineage, belonging. What the images and stories we create; its portraits expose how older women are imagined once they move beyond youth and motherhood: isolated, reduced, invisible. It reveals a collective blind spot—the way society quietly erases women when their family roles shift or end.

I chose a different path. I chose to be called Mimi in this new role — a name without the weight of age or heaviness. It feels alive, playful, and unburdened. It refuses to box me in.

MIMI is featured in the Los Angeles Center Of Photography Reservoir Catalog

Reservoir 2025

$45.00

Reservoir: Photography, Loneliness and Wellbeing

Dimensions: 6.7 x 9.4 inches
Number of pages: 96 pages
Binding: Softcover Swiss

Published January, 2026

Design: Caleb Cain Marcus, Luminosity Lab

ISBN: 978-1-959684-15-2