What Are You Doing in Front of the Saints? is the title of a project by photographer Alessandra Rinaudo, made between 2011 and 2014. A work that begins from a personal experience and becomes a visual inquiry into the mother-daughter relationship: shame, the desire for closeness, the generational gap, the difficulty of separating without losing oneself.

The project is made up of four distinct but interconnected chapters. The first, which gives the entire work its title, begins from a real episode: Alessandra’s mother finds in her daughter’s room some photographs showing her naked in her parents’ bedroom, in front of the family’s religious objects. Her reaction — the very question that names the series, “what are you doing in front of the saints?” — opens a rift: it is the moment at which the cultural and generational distance between the two women becomes visible.

The second chapter, Polka Dots, Satin and Ribbons, works on the desire for reconnection through the gesture of the handmade dress. Alessandra asks her mother to make clothes for her, as she used to do when she was a child, and to send them to her in London. The result is a series of garments that do not seem made for an adult woman, accompanied by handwritten notes documenting the exchanges between the two. Photographs of dresses, fabrics, and bodies, interspersed with diary fragments dated month by month.

With Double Portrait, Rinaudo then extends her research to her mother’s history: she collects archival family photographs, asks relatives to tell her how her mother grew up, and places the image of her mother as a young woman alongside her own. The physical resemblance between the two is unsettling: the same facial structure, the same pose, decades apart.

The third chapter closes with an autobiographical text, My Mother’s Story, written in the first person, in which family narrative becomes document.

The project closes with The Embrace, a series of self-portraits made in collaboration with her mother and photographed by her father, exactly as he used to do during her childhood. The images follow the conventions of the family portrait: frontal pose, neutral background, embraces. But something feels off. The tension is visible, the unease is present, and it is not hidden. That is precisely the point: to show what the family album traditionally keeps silent.

ph. © Alessandra Rinaudo