In photographer Alicia Vera’s portrait of her mother, Concepcion, she gazes skyward, her expression somewhere between curious and awestruck. The image has enough stylistic mottling and grain to obscure any sort of background, but Concepcion is clear: broad cheekbones, bejeweled ears, eyes full of wonder—maybe. Vera is a deeply humanistic image-maker, and it’s impossible to differentiate between a posed subject and a candid one. She approaches both with generosity.
Isolated, the phrase “va a llover toda la noche,” which translates in English to “it’s going to rain all night,” feels like a snippet of poetry or song. A few years ago, it was a note left on Vera’s door by her mother. Now, it’s the title of Vera’s new project, and a self-published book of the same name, documenting Concepcion’s Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis and Vera’s experience processing it. “Every time I go home to Miami, I stay in my childhood home,” Vera shares. “My mom loves to leave notes on the door. I kept this one; a year or so later, when I was taking out all this material I had, I thought, ‘this is exactly what this feels like.’” The portrait of her mother is one of many in Va a Llover Toda La Noche (2025); alongside Vera’s portraits, the book includes archival images of Concepcion over the last several decades, text messages, emails, and other personal ephemera.
Vera, who is based in Mexico City, is an award-winning editorial and commercial photographer, and her personal projects feature some of her most captivating images. In “Basketball in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca” (2018), she captured the Copa Mixe, a basketball tournament for Indigenous Mixe youth in Sierra Norte; for “Stripped” (2009–11), she spent years documenting strippers in Miami and the Bay Area. Her photos are devoid of the voyeuristic quality often visible in like-minded series by other artists; instead, she seems warmly welcomed, like a relative. She’s been photographing her own family, too, “since forever,” she says. “I think I knew deep down, one day, everything’s going to be so different. Every time I would go home, I would take a ton of pictures.”
Concepcion was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2018, which prompted Vera to begin photographing her more. In a Spanglish epilogue to the book, Vera writes, in English: “After my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I felt devastated, overwhelmed, anxious and helpless.” In Spanish, she adds: “Mi mamá se me iba a ir. En mi desesperación de entender lo que le estaba pasando y porque nunca realmente sentí que la conocí, empecé este proyecto llamado, Va a Llover Toda La Noche” (My mom was going to leave me. In my desperation to understand what was happening to her, and because I never really felt like I knew her, I started this project called Va a Llover Toda La Noche.) Vera’s understanding of her mother’s own personhood was limited by the challenges of their relationship—a too-common dynamic among mothers and daughters, and one that Vera has long hoped to correct. “She grew up in Mexico and I grew up in the US, so there were a lot of cultural differences,” she says. “In my 20s, I moved away and realized, ‘I really miss my mom.’ We started having these phone calls, and it hit me that my mom was an entire human … I remember trying to make an effort to get to know her, asking her really specific questions. When my mom got diagnosed, I was like, ‘Wait, but I’m just starting to get to know you.’”
In Va a Llover Toda La Noche, she continues getting to know her. There are childhood photos of little Concepcion, messages she’s sent to Vera, pages of Vera’s own journals: “My mom, mi hermosa, who I’ve been terrible to for so many years, has Alzheimer’s. Mi mami …. There’s medicine, pills, and patches, but she’s refusing to take anything despite her telling us that she would do everything possible …. Mi bella madre ….” The last sentence is interrupted by a drawing. Vera repeats mi madre, my mom, like an incantation. She finds parallels between their lives in Mexico City, decades apart — a selfie of Vera in the grass sits side-by-side with a similar photo of Concepcion at nearly the same age; both are in the same pose, perhaps on the same beach.
In contemporary portraits, Concepcion opens a pair of sliding-glass doors, holds two halves of a peach, watches the lush treetops of her Miami backyard, blocks the sun with the shade of her palm. Vera was committed to not portraying her mother from a photojournalistic distance, especially because she hasn’t shown her the project. “Even though she’s pretty advanced now, my mom continues to be my mom … She can perceive if I’m sad. If I were to give her the book, she’d sense I’m grieving her, and I don’t want to cause her any stress.” Consent is a touchstone of Vera’s practice; in its absence, she emphasized Concepcion’s dignity. “The projects on dementia and sickness that I was finding — it felt like I was seeing the same pictures over and over: a hospital bed, medicine. I knew my mom would not like that.” Vera’s mother is beautiful — and, Vera says, a proud Leo. “My mom talks about having been ‘the hottest person in the room.’ If I didn’t get her consent, what would she say if she saw a picture of herself looking ill? She’d be pissed off. For me, her dignity was front and center.”
Vera recognizes, as well, the lack of dialogue around how families and caretakers process the experience of illness, which led to her partnership with the Patient Caregiver Artist Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to advocacy, storytelling, and patient support. They partner with patients, artists, healthcare organizations, and media to highlight more intimate perceptions of the patient and caregiver experience. “The founders felt that the images healthcare providers and media outlets were using to talk about illness were often cliché stock photography. They want to promote photographers who are doing something different.” Vera has given a public talk with the organization, who continue to support and promote her project.
One image of Concepcion and Vera together, from the early aughts, is particularly striking; it is faded, and the two women’s faces look nearly identical. It’s overlaid with text: “Today was the first time she didn’t recognize me. Something broke in me.” In our conversation, I asked Vera what she’d learned about her mother through the process of putting the book together. After a particular amount of time shared with another person, becoming a caregiver is nearly inevitable; it is also complicated. “No matter how angry she ever was, she always came back to loving me,” she replied. “I’m grateful for the way she showed up for me all these years and continues to show up for me, even though she’s sick. She’s shown me how expansive love can be.”
Va a Llover Toda La Noche (2025), with text and images by Alicia Vera, is self-published by La Chancleta Voladora. It is available for purchase on the artist’s website.