Alumni
Baxter St at CCNY has long been a catalyst for innovative creation within the artistic mediums of photography and video practices. Ranging from exhibitions, residency programs, and partnerships, our core mission is to support and activate a vibrant community deeply engaged in the art of lens-based contemporary practices. Take a look at the wide breadth of alumni that are a part of our wonderful and ever-expanding community.
ARTISTS
Alice Proujansky
Project Space (2025)
ARTISTS
Alice Proujansky
Project Space (2025)
Hard Times are Fighting Times
Alice Proujansky is a documentary photographer looking at family labor: birth, work, motherhood and identity. Hard Times are Fighting Times (Gnomic Book, 2023), her photobook looking at the legacy of radical activism in her family, was long listed for the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. She is now working on a photobook about culturally-responsive birth work and a photography and quilting project about psychological formation and motherhood. Her work has been published widely, and has been supported by the Magnum Foundation, International Women’s Media Fund, New York State Council on the Arts and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Alice has taught photography since 2002 and was the lead curriculum writer for Aperture On Sight, a photography and visual literacy curriculum. A member of Women Photograph, Alice grew up in Greenfield, MA. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.
Hard Times are Fighting Times: Most families don’t have their parents’ FBI files in dusty boxes. Alice Proujansky’s does.
Hard Times are Fighting Times describes the legacy of Proujansky’s parents’ participation in radical leftist groups like Weatherman, the Native American Solidarity Committee and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee that sought to overthrow imperialism and capitalism through organizing and revolution.
Radicals like her parents believed that another world was possible, that together they could forge a more just future for humanity. Their utopian dreams of Marxist-Leninism, feminist rigor and fairness are deeply compelling – but also intensely rigid.
Mainstream histories of the movement focus on curdled utopianism, charismatic individuals, flower children gone druggy and dark.
But Hard Times are Fighting Times offers a fuller understanding. Violent dogma plays a part, but so does a beautiful dream of shared labor, equity and justice. Personal items show rigid expectations, but also familial love, loyalty and humor. The book describes a family unit with its own political movement, nation-state, culture and system of belief, as Proujansky considers if she can live up to these expectations: which parts of these perspectives to keep, and what to discard?
