For the most part I have not remained on speaking terms with the person I was back in 1979 when these pictures were taken. The past, and most particularly one's own fumbling, painful passage through it, has a way of subverting the work of the present so I am chary about revisiting it. But I welcome the reappearance of this particular moment. It's wreathed in that nimbus glow of golden-hazy early motherhood. Many of these pictures were taken on my living room floor while newborn Emmett napped. Friends would bring casseroles or crib blankets or whatever is brought to new babies, and I would ask them to lie on the floor and let me photograph them.

...Twenty Five years—That's a long time, filled with life's abundance and complexity. Certainly, these were images made in a simpler time, a time of only one serenely napping child, a time as gauzy and fleeting as the mote-speckled sunshaft that fell across his new face.

From the introduction by Sally Mann