Showing (work x family) Squaring the Equation

Images flood our days like insistent habits. The reflex to process and consume imagery from the infinite supply of pictures we are served up across media—including our own phone photography—can make conscious, selective looking hard to do.1 In this fast-changing, information-saturated society, can the evolving question of how to meet the responsibilities of family and the obligations of work be meaningfully explored through a curated collection of quiet photographs? Can their creative presentation inspire dialogue and the fresh perspectives needed to help recalculate the how-do-we-manage-it-all equation? Can family photography reflect the changing definitions of both work and family, and can it play a signal role in how we recognize and adapt to those changes?

Showing (work x family) is an expression of the belief that it can. The exhibition explores the nature of love, purpose, and identity in a physical and layered documentary experience. It comprises diversely sourced photographs integrated and presented in an original way, true to its (work x family) subject. Showing posits that through a thoughtful process of making and looking at photographs, a renewed emotional and practical clarity is possible for understanding working families. Unlike the muddy stream of digital-age imagery we lap up and use to construct virtual truths, here family photography returns to the concerns of the everyday and is given breath, space, and shape to make the story personal.

Whatever our dreams, the requirements of daily life assert themselves without fail. We are on schedules, we have tasks; our bodies, our pets, and the people in our lives depend on us to help them thrive and even survive. Sometimes we receive money for our labor; sometimes work is part of the human exchange that defines family and commitment. The images in Showing (work x family) attend to the details of the daily because when added up those details inescapably express how the round robin of employment and caretaking feels when it is lived. Our consciousness carries the domestic sphere into the professional; and in reverse, the world of work swirls in our head back at home. Externally, we play the roles each context demands; internally, we are one person wrestling with how those demands compete and force compromise. Or better, how they mutually enrich and motivate us.

Fig. 1
Cristiana Ceppas, Neyara, Housekeeper, San Rafael, California, 2012. Photograph. Commissioned for Showing: Pregnancy in the Workplace, and included in Showing (work x family). Courtesy of the artist.

In the earliest stages of making Showing (work x family), a manifest symbol was identified for when the two worlds of work and family cannot deny each other (despite the blind eye of the workplace). When a woman is at work and visibly pregnant, roles and responsibilities converge beyond the social controls of privacy and compartmentalization. She is showing, and work and family become palpably indivisible. This circumstance is exquisitely photographable, but surprisingly, neither historical nor contemporary practice shows meaningful interest in the subject. During a period of broad research, relatively few photographs of maternity and work—later-term pregnant women engaged in a variety of jobs—could be found. So a commission was devised and forty-nine noted photographers were charged with finding, following, and photographing women willing to be standard-bearers for this powerful social category long overdue the camera’s attention. The results constitute their own significant contribution to social documentary photography, but here in Showing (work x family), they are one part of a fuller, looser take on the overlap and interdependence of work and family life suggested by the titular equation.

The pregnant workers are replete with the aura of motherhood, an inescapably classical trope. Some pose in apparent reflection at their desks; some betray apprehension or bemusement at both their size and the uncertainty of exactly what is to come; others merely carry on—an ecologist in rubber boots on the bank of a river, an electrician at a job site with her tool belt strapped below her belly, a second-grade teacher giving a lesson surrounded by students on the classroom floor, or an undaunted housekeeper cleaning the vast windows of a modern home (fig. 1). While representation of the New Testament madonna and child exemplified the subject of maternity in Western art for many centuries, a roundly pregnant Mary is rather rare. One exception is the Italian Renaissance subject Madonna del Parto, most famously depicted by the painter Piero della Francesca in the fifteenth century (fig. 2). The naturalism of his expectant mother resembles today’s photographic gaze on pregnancy: the fact of her condition, like in Andrea Modica’s graduation-day portrait commissioned for Showing in 2012, is portentous, but does not overwhelm who she already is (fig. 3).