Fraction: Thanks for sharing your book, Alice! Can you tell us a bit about the project and the evolution of the book?
Alice Proujansky: Thank you for asking me about it! I started working on this project in 2017, but I had been thinking about it for a long time. I’m always trying to understand my own family, psyche and perspective. I knew that I wanted to combine documentary images with photographs of my parents’ archive, and it took a long time to sort through the materials, photograph my family and document the objects and ephemera.
When I called my dad the day after Trump was elected, we shared the perspective that it was going to lead to a lot of horror but that we’d been here before. We were both horrified but not shocked, and noticing that a lot of Progressives were shocked made me really want to share my family’s perspective.
F: I love the layout and design of the book. Your approach is so unique, with the two different sequences; “The Family” starting from one cover with a landscape orientation, and “The Archive” which starts on the opposite cover with a vertical read. By utilizing these two dynamic approaches, you create this very interesting back and forth between the archival images and objects, and your contemporary photographs. I also was very captivated by your ability to build an interesting tension between the personal family history within this larger political and historical context. How were you approaching the design elements of the book in relation to the content?
AP: I had solid ideas about image pairings: I wanted the archival objects to indicate ways you could understand the documentary images metaphorically, but I was stuck on how to combine the horizontal and vertical images without putting more weight on one of the categories. The book’s designer, Teun van der Heijden, is very skilled at integrating complex narratives. He had the idea of a bi-directional book, one that could be read vertically to emphasize the story told by the archive, or horizontally to focus on the family narrative.
It took me some time to come around to the idea, but I ended up thinking it was smart and complex: appropriate for a complex story. I like how you turn the book around in the way you might turn over an idea in your head. The book is both a people’s history and a person’s history, so it needed to articulate both an under-recognized history and a psychological experience of family formation. There are lots of ways to tell this story, and the book design speaks to that reality.
Teun found a paper that is coated on one side and uncoated on the other; the images on the coated side come from a slideshow my parents would use to organize people as part of the Native American Solidarity Committee. The slideshow images help to explain what the world felt like when my parents were active in the Left, and why young people like them made such extreme decisions.
F: I agree - the design really reflects complexity of the narrative, and makes for an introspective and multi-layered viewing experience. Sequencing is such a crucial part of any book, and with multiple sequences incorporated into one book, it must have been a real challenge. Could you tell us more about the evolution of the sequences?
AP: Teun approached the sequencing like a film: the narrative, the flow, the reveal.
I thought a lot about the image pairings. My mom’s gesture here and the hose water look like the rifle. The visual conversation militarizes my mom’s movement, because the personal and the political are mixed up in my family. It also makes me think about the intensity of my parents’ direction of us.
These two pictures share the clouds of smoke, and my family members in the bottom image look up at the one above. I like the way the archival images work like thought bubbles. The book cover here works as a caption for the snapshot below.
This spread is a visual pun. My dad, the pigs… Also the pig’s ears are the same shape as the Klan hoods, there is a meat market sign, the pictures talk back and forth. The past and the present share contradiction and continuity. Maybe the pairings are dialectical. You’d have to ask Marx.
For readers who are not this analytical, I still think the compositional similarities still give a sense of harmony and flow. Meaning can work in subtle or unconscious ways: there is a feeling of intensity, passion and anxiety. Working in this way I can say a lot without saying, leaving room for interpretation and using the way I was raised to be watchful and hyper-aware to comment on what I see.
F: How were you thinking about color and black and white images in this book? You have an excellent aesthetic balance, again through the archival and contemporary images but also in the use of different colored paper, the cover, etc. There seems to be a very deliberate approach to utilizing and restraining a color palette within the broader context of the book.
AP: I wanted the archive images to be in color. The ephemera is so bright and engaging, I love the 70s style of activist design, and I needed it to be as compelling and intense as possible. I made the documentary images black and white so they would have more nuance. A lot of this project is about moving from rigidity to elasticity, strictures to subtlety. The past can feel more present than the present in my family, so the contemporary pictures should feel more like that past in a way.
Initially, Teun chose a tan cover for the book to echo the box my dad’s FBI file is stored in. I liked that, but I wanted it to be red. Red for Communism, red for a little red book, red to shout at the reader and pull you in.
F: How were you thinking about the use of text and storytelling?
AP: I wanted a historical grounding for readers who aren’t familiar with New Left history, so I asked historian Thai Jones to write an introduction after listening to Mother Country Radicals, a podcast he worked on. His parents were in the Weather Underground, and he has a beautiful understanding of the historical and personal aspects of our shared history. I don’t think I was raised the way I was because of my parents’ activism, I think their activism is one example of the intense way they see the world and everything in it.
Some readers think this is a history book. It’s not. It tells a story about history, but it’s really about the way I grew up, and how my parents’ ways of being shaped me. The tone of our interviews underlines that. You can hear me clowning with them, trying to please them, laughing together… my dad lights up and my mom dismisses herself. It’s revealing and I like it.
I wanted to have my voice in the book, and Kristen Lubben had a particularly interesting insight about the way my dad’s externally-facing activism is more recognized than my mom’s more family-focused labor. That helped me think about my book and my family in a new way. My dad has a big FBI file – asking him about this history is the way I can connect with him – but my mom was chopping wood and taking me to Take Back the Night marches. She had a bigger influence, really.
There are a lot of entry points into this book. Some people might come to it because they’re interested in the Left, or activist design, or families; most people can connect to the concept of negotiating parental expectation. The FBI files and propaganda tell different stories in similarly strident tones, the black and white pictures are quiet, layered and metaphorical. The family snapshots are mundane but their contextualization pulls out their emotional tone. All of these stories are true in their way. That’s another reason you turn the book around in your hands.
People are going to interpret the book in their own ways: I had to let go of trying to control that when the book went to print. Not everyone reads documentary images’ meaning, not everyone thinks psychologically. That’s ok. There are a lot of valid ways to understand this work.
F: Could you describe your general practice? Do you conceive of a project and make the work, or make the work and realize how it functions - or maybe a combination? Does your approach change based on the content, and did you have multiple workflows for this project?
AP: This is the most subjective work I’ve done, I have more experience as a documentary photographer. But even at its most literal – photo essays about evidence-based, culturally-focused birth – my work is always about family labor: the ways we don’t see women’s work, how we contextualize birth, societal structures. I always look for image meanings beyond the literal, and think about how pictures work. It’s just harder for people to remember those levels of interpretation when they’re looking at documentary photographs because they look so “real.”
Since making this book, my practice has changed a lot. I’m working on a project now that uses family archives, collaborative portraits with my kids, and quilting. It’s still about family labor and psychological formation.
I do a lot of research and have a strong idea of where I want to go, but the work itself has a say in the process and I reflect on it and revise my thinking. I always knew I wanted this to be a photobook interweaving historical and emotional threads; I didn’t know how it would function until later in the process.
The best part of this project was sorting through and photographing papers, transparencies and memorabilia. It was nostalgic and exciting, the slogans made me want to join a 1970s militant leftist group right away. It made me feel a lot of respect and tenderness toward my parents, and also some frustration.
I spend a lot of time working on sequencing and relationships between images, because this plays such a strong role in how they contain and communicate meaning.
I tried reading books like The Romance of American Communism, but I found more inspiration in Alison Bechdel, Elena Ferrante, Natalia Ginzburg and Karl Ove Knausgaard: writers who engage with the documentary project by describing things directly and powerfully, and letting the reader interpret their meaning.
I didn’t finish the Communist Manifesto.
F: How has seeing your work in this format differed from seeing it exhibited in galleries or in other formats?
AP: I’ve shown this work at Photoville and am working on an exhibition that will be at Baxter St. I’m looking forward to doing it in experimental way that invites the viewer to feel they’re sorting through an archive and making subjective combinations.
I loved doing a lecture performance at ICP, it involved the clunk and whirr of a slide projector, me working from a script, a more emotional version of the work than what you might see at a talk. There are a lot of potential activations of this work.
When I was working on the project, I didn’t want a lot of other photographers in my head, so apart from a few close friends I only showed it to high school students. I asked open-ended questions to encourage teenagers to connect with the work through their personal and historical knowledge.
They were my most important critique group, and they never moan that the New Left failed. Most adults get regretful and miserable about the state of the world when they talk about politics; teenagers get angry. They feel solidarity with my parents, get excited to know this activist history, and they talk about which protest to go to next. They certainly understand the weight of parental expectation.
F: The book is beautiful and thought-provoking. Thank you so much for taking the time to share more information about the project!
AP: Thank you for looking at this work. It’s a very personal thing, and I appreciate your interest in it!
Details:
• Design: Heijdens Karwei
• ISBN: 978-1-957301-02-0
• 228 pages, 128 plates, accompanied by an interview by Kristen Lubben
• 280x217x13mm, 692 grams
• Edition: 650; First edition, first printing