The magazine of the photo-essay
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
When Judith Black moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1979 with her four
children, a friend asked her if they were going to be all right there. Frankly, she didn’t
know.
They had just moved into a dilapidated apartment in a neighborhood that the real
estate lady admitted was as good as they were going to find. The small convenience
store down the block had “fuck you” fiercely spray painted on the clapboard - a less
than encouraging welcome for a family that had grown up in the bucolic hippie house
they shared with Black’s siblings in New Hampshire. Things didn’t seem very
promising for a single mother with little income and a houseful of young children.
by Judith Black
Over the next two decades, Black would make a series of deeply felt images that chronicled the lives of her young
children, and her evolving relationship with them.
“I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to roam the streets to make photographs. I had limited time between working
at MIT as an assistant, attending classes, and being a mother. Our apartment was dark, but it became my studio.”
Judith Black