When a life nears its end, doors are closed, lights are dimmed and family secrets are whispered until silence prevails. But the photographs Tjitske Sluis took of her dying mother say this quiet part out loud.
Once a journalist for the Dutch newspaper Dagblad De Limburger, Sluis had embarked on a new career as a documentary photographer when her fiercely independent mum, Teuntje, became ill, and was soon no longer able to look after herself. The tension this inversion of roles brought was punctuated and ultimately punctured by the steady click of Sluis’s camera. She says: “I would show her a picture and she would say, “Oh, I want that printed big on my coffin”’.
Now Mom (2023), from the series Out of Love, Out of Necessity, has won Sluis third place in the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize’s 17th edition, currently the subject of an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Alongside the work of established professionals, the competition aims to showcase the work of gifted amateurs, meaning that private moments often come to the fore.
From Ukraine. Frankie Mills captures a tender moment between Polina and her daughter, Olena, as their dog, Asia, gazes at them
There can be little more intimate than the moment Sluis has shared of her mother asleep, seemingly about to set off for new lands aboard a raft of floral duvet. “That was the night I decided I was not going to go home,” Sluis says. She spent the next two weeks by her mum’s side before Teuntje died.
“What you need as a documentary photographer is antennas,” she adds. “You need to be able to tune in on someone. I do not know if it is something she said or something she did… I just looked at her and I thought, I am not going to leave.”
Other standouts in the prize exhibition include Sluis’s countryman Harmen Meinsma, who captures a 90-year-old vintage-doll collector posing among her treasures. With his playful group portrait in front of a football goal, Swiss-based Ville Niiranen says more about familial bonds and fractures in a single frame than the Outnumbered Christmas special managed in 45 minutes. The subjects of Britain’s Frankie Mills, Polly Braden and Hannah Maule-ffinch have more immediate issues; all have been displaced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The photographer lines up in goal alongside his wife, Nicole, and daughters, Laura and Maija, in the Swiss mountain village where they spend their holidays
Britain’s Steph Wilson and Australia’s Adam Ferguson took the top awards, but bronze here is not the extent of Sluis’s achievements. When Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant published her Out of Love, Out of Necessity series, it sparked debate about a growing pensioner care crisis in the Netherlands. Sluis has since put down her camera – temporarily at least – and is studying for a master’s degree in care ethics.
Sluis believes it all adds up to a fitting final tribute to her mother’s defiant, infectious spirit. “She would have been so proud,” she says. “I think this may be a crown for her.”
The Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize is at the NPG, St Martin’s Place, London until February 16, 2025
