In West Virginia, there are nanas and nans, grams and grandmas, grannies, abuelas, and even some nonnas. But many of the grandmothers there, as in so much of Appalachia, are known as mawmaws. The photographer Anthony Wilson spent five years getting to know some of these women, and his new book, “Mawmaw,” is a tribute to a specific subset of them: women who not only have grandchildren or great-grandchildren but who are their primary caregivers. These are not women who just help get their grandkids ready for school in the morning or watch them on a Saturday night; these are women who have chosen to become parents again, sparing their grandchildren from life in the foster system.

Grandfamilies, as these families sometimes call themselves, are almost always forged by tragic circumstances, whether abuse, neglect, addiction, arrest, or death. They exist everywhere in this country; nearly three million children in the United States are being raised by their grandparents, another way that older Americans are working longer, well beyond retirement age. Such families are common in Appalachia, where poverty and incarceration rates are high, and the effects of the opioid crisis linger across successive generations. In West Virginia alone, somewhere around twenty-five thousand grandchildren are being cared for by their grandparents.

Wilson met his particular mawmaws through a support group organized by West Virginia State University. He went to one of their meetings in Lincoln County, two hours or so east of Lexington, Kentucky, hoping to make a documentary, but he soon found that the children liked being filmed less than they liked being photographed. From 2021 until 2026, Wilson came and went throughout the seasons, taking pictures of grandfamilies in living rooms and on front porches, during birthdays and beside burn piles, holding on to the barrels of shotguns and the handlebars of dirt bikes, wearing ponytails and barrettes made from Queen Anne’s lace.

“Mawmaw” is a special body of work, assembled by an artist who was himself becoming a parent when he was taking these photographs, and was therefore keenly aware of what these women were choosing to do. Wilson says he still has some of the school pictures he was given by his subjects tucked into his wallet, along with a snapshot of his own daughter, who was born just before he finished his book. It is full of technical achievements—the images exhibit an almost meteorological attention to ice, sunlight, mist, and morning dew, along with a medical examiner’s eye for blood, tears, teeth, wrinkles, strands of hair, and fingernails—but its real achievement is its conceptual wholeness. “Mawmaw” is more than an assemblage of masterful images. Collectively, its subjects form a subject, an idea of family greater than any one family, and they make a moving argument about love’s indifference to circumstance and age.

“Life is just complicated, and families end up raising each other for plenty of different reasons,” Wilson says. His book does not dwell on the specific reasons these mawmaws took on the job of parenting their children’s children, although the handwritten letters he includes sometimes offer explanations. These intimate reflections read like pages taken from private diaries, with all the informality and vulnerability of that genre, including misspellings and stray thoughts. Like the photographs, they are crisscrossed with emotions of all kinds: joy and sorrow, ease and exhaustion, pride and fear, gratitude and guilt, anguish and hope. Caregivers don’t exchange vows with their young charges the way spouses do during a wedding, but one senses that, if such promises were formalized, they would take the form of the oaths of loyalty and love that Wilson has managed to capture here.

“It hasn’t been perfect,” one woman writes. “We’ve faced heartbreak, loss, and disappointments. We’ve had to visit places no child should ever have to visit.” That letter is addressed “To my Girls,” whom the letter’s author has raised for ten years, since they were four and one. “People who promised to walk with us turned away,” she continues. “I’ve gone from crying every night for years, to finding joy again in God’s presence and promise. I’ve had seasons of plenty, and seasons of struggle. Through it all, I’ve shown up every day—not perfectly, but with the best I could give.” Another grandmother writes with heartbreaking uncertainty, looking out from the shadows of a silhouetted dining-room table, framed by a laced curtain: “As I sit here alone wondering if this is the last time I will see my great granddaughter, I am thankful for the six years she has been with papaw and mamaw. When she isn’t here the emptiness and pain is so hard to bear. No one seems to care how this is affecting all of us.”

“I can’t change what life has taken from us. I can’t undo the loss of your mother, or open the prison gates for your dad, no matter how deeply I long to,” one grandmother laments, her portrait serious and self-possessed, her letter’s valediction ringing: “I GOT YOU. Come hell or high water. I GOT YOU.” That same determination appears in faces and phrases throughout Wilson’s book, including a letter that sings from beside a photograph of a grandma tying a boy’s tennis shoe while he stretches his leg up to meet her mobility scooter: “They are mine! My flesh, my blood. I would go to the ends of this earth to get them if needed.”

Such pairings are one of Wilson’s strengths, his eye for portraiture matched by his skill for arranging images on the page. Some of his diptychs are pointed, almost didactic: the smush of a child’s face against a windowpane set beside the snarl of a dog against a chain-link fence; a minnow net dangling like a dream from a boy’s arms on one side and the shiny nightmare of a dead minnow in his palm on the other; to the right, a wobbly-kneed fawn, and to the left a beanpole of a girl just as defenseless in front of an untended, overgrown trailer.

My favorite of Wilson’s pairings is one in which the white space divides a grandmother in half, her arms reaching across the entire two-page spread, as though all the way from east to west, holding one granddaughter on the left and another on the right, love and wholeness uniting the two photographs while division and brokenness try to keep them apart, in a kind of hopeful symmetry. Compositionally, there is much to admire: one granddaughter a muse of worry, the other a muse of relief; the grandmother’s body a pillar like the ones stabilizing a bridge in the background; the light reflecting on the surface of the water a mirage of permanence, as if darkness will never come and this embrace will never end.

There’s an embarrassment of such embraces in “Mawmaw,” where photograph after photograph shows baby hands and toddler arms crooked into the palms and elbows of relatives, rail-thin torsos tucked into ample bosoms and oversized bodies, younger siblings nestled next to older siblings, pets cuddled closely by the children who care for them. Wilson captures the yearning to tend even in those most in need of tending: grandparents whose children should rightfully be taking care of them; young children whose burgeoning capacity for care has outlasted their original caretakers.

But “Mawmaw” isn’t sentimental. Absent the letters that reveal some of the specific trials of these grandfamilies, you would not be able to infer much about their circumstances. There is nothing pitying and also nothing airbrushed in the pictures—just the occasional haze of a misty morning or the blurry tremor of a burning brush pile. In many ways, these are all-American childhoods, with Band-Aids and birthday candles, denim-draped clotheslines and window-paint stick figures, sidewalk-chalk fireworks and curtains of iridescent bubbles. Some shots include run-down cars or stained furniture, cigarettes or peeling paint, but nothing that would be out of place in any other rural setting, whether cleats or creek beds, antler mounts or bunny hutches, roadkill or gutter icicles.

Even the pictures that are particularly charged in this context rebuke our pity, reminding us that generations of kin come and go in most other households, too. Take an image that features two modest headstones, the one on the left reading “FATHER” and the one on the right, “MOTHER.” These could simply be great-grandparents put peacefully to rest in old age, a kind of grief far removed from that which children feel over parents who simply cannot care for them, or parents lost to murder or addiction, as some of the letters describe. Granite can tell us only so much, and the leaves scattered across the composition insist on the passage of time for any family, not just these.

There are many such gestures toward mortality in “Mawmaw.” Thawing ice along a riverbank, the shallows capturing the reflection of one of the grandchildren; the burning flame of a wick disappearing into a birthday cake; the deep, dark tunnel of a fleeting set of train tracks, as piercing as the endless blue eyes of the toddler in the diptych beside it. But there are also many subtle gestures toward immortality, suggesting that Wilson has learned to see beyond the conditions of loss and precarity that created these families. Perhaps the most striking of his symbolic pictures is one of a Virginia creeper vine crawling up the wall of an abandoned building, its Pentecostal red almost corpuscular in its sprawling reach—a visual metaphor for these pruned but persistent family trees, and perhaps even a cross, for those whose eyes are trained to search for them.

In the letters that Wilson collected, there are countless appeals to God, prayers for help and understanding and prayers of thanksgiving for strength and mercy. They are beautiful whatever your understanding of creation, though clearly many of these mawmaws believe that all things, even terrible and tragic things, work together for the good. The women here seem to have made whatever peace they can with all that they cannot explain to their grandchildren, a hardscrabble happiness detailed in their written testimony and evidenced throughout these gorgeous pictures. And who can say for sure whether twilight is the arrival of some dark night or the coming of the dawn, or whether a scrawny boy’s shoulder blades might really be the nubs of angel wings, or where, if anywhere, any of us will find new life.