In 1979, Judith Black enrolled in the Creative Photography Lab at MIT to pursue her MFA in photography. A single mother of four living on limited means, Black moved her brood into a dilapidated apartment into Cambridgeport, Massachusetts: a multi-ethnic working-class neighbourhood that had been part of the industrial, port area of the Charles River just 15 minutes from the school.
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“It was a very hard time in my life,” Black remembers. “We were lucky to find the apartment and to be able to afford it. It was then that I realised how the chance of birth gives one privilege… or denies it.”
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Amid the relentless demands of being a working mother and student, Black turned to photography to create a space to record the lives of her loved ones long before family-based work was taken seriously by the art world. “It was seen as too ‘confessional,” Black says.
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