The exhibition, inaugurated during Art City Bologna and running until 12 April 2026 at L’Artiere Bookshop, brings together works by Martina Bacigalupo, Angela Cappetta, Lois Conner, Kristen Joy Emack, Amy Friend, Greg Miller, Andrea Modica, Scott Offen, and Cheryle St. Onge. This collective endeavor summons the experience of pregnancy, the complexities of nurturing children, and the harrowing vigil of accompanying loved ones through illness, until death tears us apart.
The presented works transcend the boundaries of the traditional nuclear family to encompass chosen families, educational communities, and bonds forged over time through care, collaborative work, and everyday proximity. These pieces narrate intimate stories lived from within, where photography relinquishes mere representation to become an instrument of relationship, presence, and ethical responsibility.
Drawing inspiration from Italian Renaissance altar paintings, Lois Conner explores the ephemeral moment when women carry life in their womb. “When I was 17, my older sister Susan allowed me to photograph her.” She explains. “I was astonished by how her newly prominent veins and capillaries defined her pregnant body as they traced down her arms and across her abdomen and breasts. I felt I could almost glimpse the growing child through her translucent skin.”
This became the genesis of her project, executed using her 7×17 panoramic camera for standing portraits. “Around the turn of the millennium, I found myself surrounded by women — colleagues, family, friends — who were expecting, and I felt an urgent need to photograph them. Perhaps the urgency stemmed from knowing their pregnancy was limited to roughly nine months. To photograph a woman before she gives birth, a loved one before they perish, the sunlight before it wanes and darkness falls — these are all catalysts and expressions of the life force.”
Greg Miller’s poignant work transforms an ordinary ritual — children waiting for the school bus — into a meditation on innocence, fragility, and resilience. Conceived in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, his project unfolds over twelve years in his Connecticut community, where the act of saying goodbye at the driveway’s end resonates with unprecedented and unsettling gravity. “There have been over 500 school shootings in the United States since Sandy Hook,” he recalls.
Photographed with an 8×10 view camera, his portraits capture children as they step from the intimacy of home toward the wider world, bearing the tacit weight of a national anxiety that has reshaped the landscape of American parenthood. “As history has shown, lasting change may take a generation or more. Until then, the children stand at the end of the driveway, waiting — not just for the morning bus, but for all of us to see their humanity.” At once personal and universal, his work speaks to love and fear, to the everyday gestures that acquire symbolic meaning in times of uncertainty, and to the unspoken duty of safeguarding the next generation.
Sourced from family albums, digital discoveries, and market finds, images are reimagined through Amy Friend’s artistic vision. “This work began through conversations with my Nonna as we looked through old family albums, where fading memories revealed how photographs retain meaning even when their stories are incomplete,” the artist, originally from Canada, notes. Her photography embodies a dual meaning of illumination and birth.
“I began collecting vernacular images and, through hand-piercing the photographs to let light pass through, transformed each into something both material and immaterial. In doing so, I also consider the original photographer’s gesture, their light of that moment, as part of an ongoing dialogue about time, memory, and photography itself.” The images transform moments into ethereal scenes where figures and landscapes are adorned with luminous patterns, evoking a sense of magic and nostalgia.
Born from the experience of her mother’s illness and passing, American photographer Cheryle St. Onge’s work delicately explores the shifting roles between mother and daughter and the search for traces of continuity within the landscape they once shared. Witnessing her final moments, she navigates grief through the act of photography. Her images, like windows of light and silence, stand as a testament to love, loss, and transformation.
Family thus emerges as a micro-society founded on trust and solidarity: a space for growth and transformation, but also an essential resource for cultivating a sense of belonging today. “We Are Family” contributes to the international dialogue on new forms of affective community and on the role of photography as an ethical and participatory practice, offering a sensitive and necessary perspective on how, despite everything, it remains possible to move forward together.
The collective photographic exhibition “We Are Family” is on view until 12 April 2026 at L’Artiere Bookshop in Bologna.
