Mother and Child
Through meeting two children with Down’s Syndrome from different families, I became interested in the differing ways that Down’s Syndrome has been considered through history. What attracted me most was that the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna(1431~1506) portrayed Jesus in the image of the Virgin and Child as a child with Down syndrome, but Martin Luther (1483-1546) publicly called for the killing of people with intellectual disabilities. we can see clearly that even though they have the same religion, there were two very different attitudes towards people with disabilities. Some people speculate that Down's syndrome was not considered as a disease at that time. After all, the existence of Down syndrome was first published by John Langton Tang in 1866 in Conditions of congenital mental retardation.This shows that the classification criteria and categories of disabilities are variable, and that the division between normal and disabled people is actually some kind of conscious social behavior. In a certain period of time, people being regarded as being disabled by society, may be considered normal human beings in another space-time situation. Everyone has a different body, and it is because of this difference that we are able to exist as unique human beings. However, the different physical appearance of people with disabilities often becomes the focus of public attention, so much that they are despised, ridiculed, and even regarded as evil.When people are used to look at disabled people with different eyes, people raising children with disabilities face great pressure. So, I wanted to respond to the portrait of the Virgin and Child by Andrea Mantegna, by taking photographs of some mothers with children born with disabilities.












