Project Archives

We showcase new perspectives on everyday life through art and content generated by us and in partnership with others. Using varied media, we rethink assumptions, prompt reflection, and start conversations.

David Binder, Anna, interpreter, 2012

Showing: Pregnancy in the Workplace was an online exhibition created in collaboration with professional photographers and pregnant women (as well as their workplaces). The project explored how photographs can help us think critically about our values and our expectations about family life.

Showing developed when camera phones and hashtags were still in their infancy, and extensive research by Working Assumptions between 2009 and 2012 uncovered only a handful of photos depicting pregnancy in the workplace. Staged stock photos and celebrity "baby bump" shots were plentiful, but real-life images were few and far between.

Then, as now, pregnancy in the workplace was a familiar part of public life. Pregnant women work in all areas: offices, legislatures, warehouses, hospitals, stores, fields, and anywhere else they can collect a paycheck.

Arizona State University installation, 2019

Showing (work x family) was a photography project about the push and pull of work and family and its relevance to our kids, coworkers, elders, partners, and society. Presented as a screen-based exhibition for a wide array public venues, Showing (work x family) revealed the intimate choreography of everyday routines and situations — a universal balancing act with no fixed equation.

Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like? was a multi-platform photographic celebration of sports and physical daring in the lives of girls and women. Anticipating today’s widespread enthusiasm for women’s sports by more than two decades, the Game Face exhibition debuted at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arts & Industries Building in June 2001, followed by the University of Utah during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By 2005 the exhibition had toured to sixteen museums and galleries in major American cities.

In conjunction with the exhibition tour, Random House published a book of the same name, with tens of thousands of copies in circulation in hardcover and paperback. Featuring work by more than 100 of America’s most acclaimed photographers, the Game Face book and exhibition spanned more than a century of girls’ and women’s participation in sports in the United States.