Mother’s Day was a holiday created with the best intentions of honoring one’s mother. It quickly devolved into marketing device for selling greeting cards, flowers and chocolates and continues along that vein today, with same-like, mass-produced items, largely in shades of pink and lavender, crowding the aisles of chain drugstores.

So today, when I stopped in at the International Center of Photography, I was stopped in my tracks by a huge window display that honors the mothers of ICP staffers – and women in general – through photography. And just to keep the theme going, I threw in a flower picture that I had grabbed on my way to the subway an hour earlier.

Street scenes on a drizzly spring day in April. Photos: Peggy Roalf.

Along with photo books about and by women, from a bio of Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s lover and partner-in-crime during the Spanish Civil War, to Jerry Schatzberg’s Women Then: Photographs 1954-1969, to Lillian Bassman’s Women, are blow-ups made from snapshots contributed by ICP staffers.

What makes the display so affecting is that these photos are so very personal. For the most part they are snapshots of happy moments from childhood; from family vacations; and from special events – one of the standouts is a black-and-white picture of mother and daughter at the ice rink, in a 1970s fashionista mode on the part of the mom.

There is only one picture that appears to be a studio portrait, and it’s of a beautiful young African-American woman. Stylistically, it can be matched to the period covered in Jasper Texas, an exhibition of photographs of the African-American community of a small East Texas town made by Alonzo Jordan (1903-1984). Jordan was a barber and self-taught photographer who documented the world in which he lived and worked. In chronicling the important events of Jasper, including weddings, graduations, church socials, high school sporting events and school dances, he created a highly affirmative image of his subjects, their families, and their community.

So let this be a reminder, on two accounts: Mother’s Day is May 8^th; and Japser, Texas: The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan closes on May 8^th at the International Center of Photography. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, between 43^rd-44^th Streets, NY, NY.