Luupe photographer Jillian Guyette’s debut photobook, We Keep Swimming, Until We All Reach Home (Daylight Books), is a meditation on lineage, belonging, and the unseen rhythms that connect generations of women. With a moving foreword by Elinor Carucci, the book reframes how we see motherhood and grandmotherhood, celebrating their intimacy and strength. We caught up with Jillian to learn more about how becoming a mother cracked her open creatively, how intuition guided her process, and how her daughter shaped the work in unexpected ways.

Her book is now available for preorder. You can order it through Daylight Books (and other booksellers) here.

Jillian has also created a licensable collection of stock imagery that includes a selection of companion images that extend the spirit and energy of the book.

Jillian Guyette: When I gave birth to my daughter it felt as if I was giving birth to a new version of myself. This work in turn feels like a direct result of that very cosmic shift I felt as I became a mom. She was born during the first days of the pandemic, in March of 2020. I was stepping into this life changing role amidst social isolation and deep collective uncertainty. It felt like I was given mandatory quiet and space away from the world to get to know the two of us in a way I may not have been able to have had the world not shut down.

Once I got my bearings, I eventually picked up my camera with the intention of creating a new body of work. I felt so utterly cracked open by motherhood, and also began to feel an immense surge of creative energy. Once my intuition, which had felt very dormant, started to wind its way back to me - that was when the work really took on a life of its own.

Guyette: There are certain pictures that I have an attachment to that feel so representative of what feeling I was moving through at that exact moment. Others feel like they encapsulate years upon years of childhood memories I had tucked away.

The picture of the yellow post-it notes, my husband’s grandmother used to leave them for me when she returned a dish that held something I baked for her. She lived two doors down from us before she passed. I was in the middle of working on this project during that time, and I kept moving these post-it notes around as I tried to figure out why they felt so significant. What I realized is they were this tactile representation of the Grandmother energy, the exploration of lineage and belonging that I was moving through at that very moment in my work. It’s abnormal these days to live so close to family, and we had three generations right in a row. Something about the physicality of that really started to feel significant.

Other pictures feel like they live outside of the timeline when I took them. The white house with overgrown greenery - it could be any of the rural houses of upstate New York that I would see as I stared out the window of my dad’s Jeep when he would make the long trip to pick me up from my mom and drive me to his house in the country. I look at that picture and it feels like I plucked it straight from the memory of seven year old me.

Guyette: Intuition guided nearly every aspect of this work. Creativity and intuition go hand in hand, and I believe all of us are intuitive to some degree. What varies is how we each harness and act on it. Oftentimes I would write something down that came to me, seemingly out of nowhere that I wanted to make a picture of. Sometimes it would take months for it to feel like the right time to even try to make it happen. Other times the opportunity would just present itself, or it would feel like a sudden burst of energy to create something that hadn’t been there moments earlier. I spent a lot of time waiting for those internal pings before moving forward. If I forced a picture, it never worked. Once I began to focus on making the body of work more seriously, it felt like I had an internal guide that was quietly, and then not so quietly steering me to keep moving forward.

Guyette: It’s been sweet and overwhelming to watch my daughter interact with different phases of the book. She loves looking at the pictures of her and the pictures of her grandmothers. She’s five, so her understanding of it will grow and change as she ages.She shaped so much of the work in ways I could not have predicted, simply by being herself. I was often getting completely different pictures than I was expecting once I got my film back. Or I would be drawn to pictures that weren’t the ones I set out to make. Children are such incredible subjects in that sense. There’s a magic and also a frustration to the process that really taught me so much about being patient, and being present.

Guyette: The title encapsulates my realization of how tethered I am to all of the women who came before me, and how that tether evolves as I raise my daughter. When I found the title, it spoke so clearly and cohesively to the main through line of the work - that women are born with all of the eggs we will ever carry, in essence it means that we lived for a time in the womb of our grandmother. It’s such a grounding sentiment during this season of life, a time that has really been a bellwether for where I put my creative energy. Perhaps most importantly, it represents the clarity I’ve been given on the importance of having the support of a village, in whatever form that takes.

Guyette: As a spiritual person, I’m often drawn to the natural landscape. I think a lot about the muscle memory of a place, and how we can sometimes feel right at home even though we’ve never set foot there before. There’s also an element of trying to imprint my emotional state into an environment that I find to be deeply meditative and an essential part of building this particular body of work. Certain places are significant and burned into my memory, like Lily Dale - the spiritualist community where my family had a house before my parents got divorced. I only remember my early days in that community from the pictures. We scattered my father’s ashes in the woods of the community when I was 11, and within the past few years I desperately tried to photograph the exact place where we did it, to no avail. Once I moved away from the shot I thought I should take, that was when I got the pictures that are in the book, the ones I actually needed to make. The moss growing in the woods, my mother holding my daughter near our old home. Those pictures were some of the first that allowed me to marry portraits and nature, to keep them in conversation. I wanted the portraits to feel grounded between environments that felt significant to me, but perhaps mysterious enough to allow a viewer to get lost in their own memory.

Guyette: There weren’t necessarily new stories, but I did find new clarity. Having my own daughter gave me a much deeper level of understanding my own childhood and family dynamics. Making this book was a balm, like I was allowing the small version of myself to have a warm and safe space to feel feelings and work through the nuance of an abnormal childhood. I spent a lot of years feeling very “other” due to the nature of having a medium for a father, alongside being an intuitive and sensitive kid. Now that I’m in the driver seat, it feels so important to give my daughter the space to be sensitive and creative and expressive and to feel her feelings right out loud.

Guyette: Photographing people is so vulnerable for all involved. It’s vulnerable for the subject, and the person taking the picture. There’s a push and pull of energy when you decide you’re going to photograph someone, and I spent many years feeling hesitant to take the kinds of pictures I wanted to of my family. All of it shifted significantly after becoming a mom. I felt a different level of freedom and inhibition and also felt like I saw and understood my family in a whole new way. It allowed me to see my mother through the lens of a mother, I saw her humanity in a whole new light. It created a deeper bond with my mother-in-law, who really allowed me to photograph her with such openness and warmth.

Guyette: Working with the entire team at Daylight has been a joy. My book designer - Ursula Damm, was so thoughtful with the work every step of the way. I knew these pictures had to be with someone who would feel drawn to them on a personal level, and that was Ursula. She has created something incredibly special.

Guyette: Get as many eyes on your project as you can that aren’t your own. The less attached someone is to the work is often the best feedback. It’s so difficult to edit in a vacuum, and other people’s perspectives are an essential part of the process to get a project to the next level.