At one point during Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project, the controversial fine art photographer after whom the film is named reveals that, as a result of her rocky childhood, she feels emotionally exposed. There could be no better summation of Gearon's work or Jack Youngelson and Peter Sutherland's documentary, which studies the intensely intimate relationships that the photographer has formed with her three highly personal subjects: her mother and two children. Gearon rose to art-world prominence with a scandalous show at London's notorious Saatchi Gallery in Spring 2001, during which the London police nearly charged her with child pornography over certain images depicting her two children in the nude. Even though the uproar was absurd, the press had a tremendous impact on Gearon. She began to doubt herself as a mother, and as a result, the focus of her photography shifted from her children to her own manic-depressive, schizophrenic mother. With this intriguing mother-daughter dynamic in mind, the two directors explore Gearon's mother's psychological problems, which began when Gearon was a young teen and resulted in the rupture of her parents' marriage. Years later, Gearon's own failed marriage proves to be one of the catalysts for her immersion in photography. Throughout the film Gearon maintains that photography is her way of documenting her family while undertaking a kind of expressive self-examination. According to her, all of her photos are portraits of herself.