Photographer-Mother Shares Pictures Showing Life Between Work & Motherhood

Tuesday, April 19 2016, 03:25:20

Team JWB

Photographer-Mother Shares Pictures Showing Life Between Work & Motherhood

JWB Post

April 15, 2016

Photographer Alice Proujansky has worked with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Magazine. Clearly, she lives a helluva busy life. However, once she became a mother of two beautiful kids, her life took a rather serious turn. Like most of the working mothers, she too faced difficulties balancing her life.

She says, “I had a whole identity that centered in a large part around my career, around what photography meant, and how much I believed in documentary photography. There have been times when finding an identity that integrated motherhood and my individual self and my work have seemed impossible. It’s not about finding balance necessarily, or ‘having it all,’ it’s just an ongoing negotiation that moves along a spectrum.”

She soon planned a photo shoot called Women’s Work depicting women simultaneously occupying spheres of motherhood and career. She explains, “It ended up being about people who are sort of a projection of me. It made me feel like other women were working on this too. It helped just being with people who understood what I was going through.”

In the series, Alice has explored their concerns, documenting a number of women’s issues, from reproductive health clinics to childcare workers while shooting. She says, “When you see a woman with a child on the street, you think, ‘That’s a mom,’ but that person became a mother. Especially if that woman has no other children, it probably happened very recently. It’s such a huge shift. My children mean everything to me, but there are times when I begin to resent the demands that they place on me, and that’s very normal, but that doesn’t really go along with our culture’s expectation of mothers being selfless, constantly loving, and endlessly self-sacrificing.”

Have a look at a few stories that she captured:

Alice Proujansky with her children, January Murray and William Murray and her husband Nick Murray on Halloween.

Nurse Kayla Jones, 25, updates a patient’s chart after her abortion at Buffalo Womenservices. The patients receive conscious sedation, which lessens the pain and causes amnesia, but they are aware of the procedure while it takes place. Jones gave birth to her now four-month-old daughter at the Birth Center of Buffalo.

Nurse Kayla Jones, 25, pumps breast milk for her four-month-old baby at Buffalo Womenservices. She assists with abortion procedures and gave birth at the Birth Center of Buffalo.

Moments after giving birth at home, Jen Carnig holds her son husband, daughter and friend look on.

You can check out Alice Proujansky’s work here.

Source.