Mother, Daughter, Desert Moon

Developed over nearly fifteen years in Rajasthan, this long-term photographic project explores intergenerational relationships as a form of social architecture—shaped by ritual, hierarchy, and inherited space. Within this structure, the bond between mothers and daughters becomes a site where tradition is preserved, questioned, and gradually transformed. Mother, Daughter, Desert Moon centers on the bond between mothers and daughters—intimate, historical, inherently political, and deeply visual. Embedded in culture yet radical in its potential, this work shows that tradition is never fixed; it evolves. As girls gain access to education, new forms of agency begin to reshape expectations within families and communities. In Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, where centuries-old patriarchal norms shape daily life, these relationships reveal how women negotiate identity, resilience, and the possibility of transformation. Intertwining portraiture with ethnographic sensitivity, Bertucci uses the camera to deeply witness this evolution. Mother, Daughter, Desert Moon traces a dialogue between daughters’ emerging futures and their mothers’ enduring traditions—an act of witnessing that seeks not to define, but to understand. Informed by feminist and postcolonial thought, Bertucci engages thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, attentive to how marginalized voices are heard—or silenced. She also echoes the words of Arundhati Roy, who reminds us, “Another world is not only possible; she is on her way.”