Alice Proujansky pairs intimate family photos with archival objects to explore her parent’s radical past

Most children don’t grow up with their parents’ FBI files gathering dust in their family homes. But Alice Proujansky did. In the 70s and 80s, her parents were part of radical leftist groups like Weatherman, which planned to overthrow the US government. The FBI was intensely focused on this small group of mostly white college students, tapping phones, surveilling members and attempting to infiltrate the organisation.

In a new book, Hard Times are Fighting Times, Alice revisits her parents’ archive, combining documents and ephemera with new photography to re-tell this radical social history. “My parents fell in love while planning a 60,000-person demonstration in 1976,” Alice reveals, in the project description. “Their friends joked that it would never last – my mom was a Marxist, my dad an Anarcho-Communist – but they’ve been married for 40 years. The story of their activism is the story of me.”

The project was fueled by the shocking result of the 2016 election, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the US. “I saw the need for more leftist histories, and I was ready to start,” she says. In the book, family photos are paired with artefacts like journals, leaflets, posters, and FBI surveillance files – documents she discovered tucked away gathering dust in her parents’ attic.

Alice’s own photographs depict simple, everyday moments: family barbecues, children playing in the garden, swimming in the creek. This mix of intimate snapshots and powerful political memorabilia paints a vivid picture of not just her parents’ fight, but her own upbringing within an activist family. Which was, in many ways, ordinary.

Radicals like her parents believed that another world was possible, but mainstream accounts of their movement tend to focus on utopian ideals gone sour, charismatic leaders, and the darker side of the counterculture. Hard Times are Fighting Times offers a more comprehensive and nuanced account. The book captures both the strict ideals and beautiful visions of shared labour, justice, and equity that shaped Alice’s family life. Personal items not only reveal her parents’ optimism, but also their love, loyalty, and humour. Through her work, Alice ruminates on whether she can meet these standards, weighing which elements of her parents’ ideals to embrace or set aside.

“It was challenging to look at and articulate some of the pressures and anxiety I felt as a kid. But I also felt really proud of and connected to my parents because of the work they’ve done,” she says. “Some people might come away with a better understanding of the interplay between political action and psychological perspectives,” she says, “other people might get excited about Anarcho-Communism – and that’s good too.”