Larsen has demonstrated a strong interest in developing her talents, and has produced a number of excellent photographs that made her project and her portfolio a strong candidate.
Larsen’s project made an immediate impression on the editorial staff, and they see it as a fascinating approach to Norwegian society in 2011. She has been working on this project for over a year, and is clearly involved in it on a long-term basis. At the same time she is establishing, with intelligence and insight, a connection between the situation in Norway and that of people and regions on the other side of the world.
Excerpt from the project description
Distant Mothers
Every year women from all over the world come to Norway to work. Many of these women are mothers. They have one goal in mind when they leave their children: to be able to give them a better future. In the project that I have begun, I have photographed women from four different cultures – the Philippines, Romania, Russia and Nigeria – who share this objective. I am portraying these mothers in Norway as well as in their native countries.
In today’s welfare society it is becoming increasingly common for ordinary Norwegian families and employers to hire inexpensive foreign labour. This has a substantial social impact on the home communities of these workers. Children grow up with their grandparents or aunts and uncles, and in extreme cases the children are sent to orphanages or left to fend for themselves.
This project will show the reasons for this work-related emigration, the challenges it poses to the everyday lives of the families who are left behind in these women’s native countries, and what the situation is for these women in their host country, Norway. I will focus on communities where more and more children are growing up without closely related care providers, and I will investigate how such a lack of caregiving affects them. Does increased access to material goods and education make up for the absence of a mother?
