Mother Muse - Mother's Day Mini Portraits in Newcastle
Mother Muse was a Mother's Day mini portrait session by Emily of Solis Stories, a Newcastle-based photographer capturing all of love's stories. For Mother's Day 2026, Emily turned Tatt Brat studio into a light-filled portrait space built around one concept: refraction; the idea that motherhood doesn't change who you are, it reveals every version of you that was already there.
The Concept
Mother Muse was built around a single idea: refraction.
A prism doesn't create colour. It reveals what was already carried inside white light; every wavelength, every hue, already there, just unseen until something splits it open. Motherhood works the same way. It doesn't erase who a woman was before. It refracts her. It takes the single beam of identity she carried and separates it into something wider, more complex, more luminous.
That was the anchor for this entire series of Mother's Day portraits. Not a set of matching outfits against a seamless backdrop. A real concept- one that shaped the studio setup, the crystalline elements, and the way light moved through the room. Prisms and crystal scattered light across skin, fabric, and walls. Nothing was static. The light shifted as people moved through the space, which meant every frame was unrepeatable - a portrait that could only exist in that exact second.
How It Worked
This was a first for me. I've never done a portrait studio session before - my work usually lives outdoors, in movement, in the mess of real life. But for Mother's Day, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to build a space from scratch and see what happened when women walked into a concept rather than a location.
I turned Tatt Brat studio in Newcastle - the space where we hold Lovefool Elopements - into a portrait studio for the day. Twenty families came through. Some were local. Some travelled over two hours to be there. Each session ran for fifteen minutes. Short by design.
There's something about a contained window of time that strips away the pressure to perform. No one had to hold a smile for an hour. No one had to wrangle a toddler through an extended shoot. Fifteen minutes. Walk in, breathe, exist inside the concept, and let the light do its work.
Some women came alone with one child. Some brought the whole family. Every configuration was different.
Why Concept-Driven Portraiture Matters
Most Mother's Day mini sessions start with logistics. What to wear, where to stand, how to smile. Mother Muse started with an idea.
When a session is built around a real concept, the woman in front of the lens doesn't have to manufacture an emotion or hold a pose. She steps into something that already has shape and meaning, and the portraits come from that.. not from direction, not from prompting, but from the interaction between a person and an idea.
Concept-first. Editorially oriented. Grounded in references from art, colour theory, and culture rather than photography trends. The goal is always to create portraits that say something - not just document what someone looked like on a given day.
TheGallery
Below is a sample of the Mother Muse series - over 4000 Mother's Day portraits were taken that day. Every refraction. Every version of light that these women carried into the room.
