Weaning Elowen, and the Quiet Complexity of Letting Go
Shoot The Frame 2025 Annual Awards (One Frame Finalist) — A narrative interview with Hanna Wolf on long-form self-portraiture, motherhood, and the single frame where light, gesture, and feeling align.
Hanna Wolf’s One Frame finalist image, Weaning Elowen, sits inside a long-form self-portraiture series exploring her experience of motherhood. Selected as a One Frame Finalist in the Shoot The Frame 2025 Annual Awards, the photograph holds a moment many parents recognise, even if they rarely see it represented with this kind of quiet honesty. It reflects the emotional complexity of weaning her last baby, carrying “both the sadness of an ending and the quiet sense of release” at the same time.
For Wolf, the image is not about a definitive version of what weaning looks like. It is about acknowledging competing truths without forcing one to win. She describes the frame as an intentional act of holding both defeat and grace in the same breath, and of letting go of expectations she may have carried into the moment. “Weaning doesn’t look the same for everyone,” she says, “and I wanted to create an image that honours the quiet reality of that experience.”
Her process balances planning with presence. With self-portraiture there is inevitably intention involved, but Wolf resists locking herself into a rigid approach before she makes the image. Instead, she leaves space to witness what is actually unfolding. “I try not to define my approach before taking an image,” she says. “I also make space to simply witness the moment and be fully present within it as it unfolds.”
Working with children brings a specific kind of technical challenge, one that is less about equipment and more about surrendering control. Incorporating her children adds “another layer of unpredictability”, and it requires her to work at their pace while respecting their patience and preferences. The process, she says, has to remain flexible. Rather than attempting to control every detail, she trusts that the right image will emerge when she allows space to genuinely connect in the moment.
That trust is also central to how she thinks about selection. Wolf believes that within any moment there is a single frame where light, gesture, and feeling fall into place. In a digital era where it is easy to produce hundreds of images, she sees the real challenge as recognising the one that carries emotional truth. The act of choosing is not administrative. It is the work. She describes trusting instinct over quantity as one of the most powerful parts of her process.
Weaning Elowen is “both” planned and found. Wolf had a clear sense of what she wanted the image to be, but she also recognises that, with children, you never fully know what will happen. Their presence shapes the emotional weight of the final frame, and their openness has had a sustained impact on the work she has made over the years.
Visually, Wolf begins with light. She describes her practice as rooted in a study of colour and how it makes her feel, and she spends significant time observing how light moves through the spaces she photographs in. Every decision, she says, returns to the quality of the light, and the way it shapes the emotional language of an image.
Across her broader body of work, Wolf returns to themes of place, identity, and memory. Much of her practice explores a person’s place within their own familial archive, and the way homes and land shape what a family remembers. That attention to environment, and to the emotional residue of domestic spaces, sits underneath Weaning Elowen even when the moment itself is intimate.
Wolf is currently in the early stages of a new body of work exploring the impact of wildfire and drought within the small rural farming community where she lives. And her advice to photographers building their first serious project echoes the long view that runs through her own practice: give the work the time it needs. Projects can take years. It is important to step back, reconsider what you have made, and stay open to the possibility that where you begin is not where you end.
