Building A Family
About The Series

Building a Family: How This Series Came to Be

by Mary Motley Kalergis

When I first set out to become a photographer I didn’t plan on creating a series of books about building a family. It was over fifty years ago – I was still a teenager – and, inspired by the photodocumentary journalism in Life magazine,  I began following some natural instinct to document, listen, and better understand what was happening around me. Then, as a young mother and a still-want-to-be documentary photographer, I began to witness the shape of my own life with a camera in one hand and, a bit later, a tape recorder in the other. My first book, Giving Birth, was just that—an act of witness, as I stood beside and photographed women crossing one of life’s most intimate and private thresholds.

This instinct — to go where life was unfolding and try to tell the truth about it—propelled me into the books that followed. Mother: A Collective Portrait, my third published work, emerged from the thick of my own parenting of three – and then four – children. With This Ring: A Portrait of Marriage came a bit later, as I began to look more deeply at what it means to make and sustain a marriage. Considering Adoption was born out of quiet conversations with people who told me, “I didn’t give birth — but I still built a family.” Seen & Heard: Teenagers Talk About Their Lives grew from the hectic, magic years when our big old Virginia farmhouse was filled with the comings and goings of teenagers — mine and others — who, along with many from outside our own tribe, had the courage to tell me what was on their minds.

Each of these books stood on its own when first released. They were published at different times by different houses — Harper & Row, E.P. Dutton, The Chrysler Museum of Art — and then, for a long while, many of them went out of print. But even while the books sat on shelves or in boxes, something in them kept humming. Over time, I began to see something I hadn’t seen before: together – these books form a kind of whole.

Each volume captures a different phase, or threshold, or reckoning, about building a family. Although the original order of publication was scattered, the emotional logic was clear. First comes two people choosing each other: Volume I – With This Ring, A Portrait of Marriage. Then comes two different but equally powerful ways that children enter a family: Volume II – Giving Birth, and Volume III – Considering Adoption. Then in Volume IV – Mother: A Collective Portrait, we explore the unglamorous, astonishing work of family building that is done by millions of women every day. Finally comes Volume V – Seen & Heard: Teenagers Talk About Their Lives, where the kids, now teenagers, get to tell their side of the story.

That’s how the five volume Building a Family series was born—from a realization of what this part of my life’s work actually was. Together with Atelerix Press, we’re republishing these five volumes – restoring and, where called for, slightly re-imagining them, using modern tools, old-fashioned craftsmanship, and respect for the original material.

You won’t find perfection here, or any “last word.” The people are real — sometimes raw, sometimes luminous, always brave. Their words, paired with their images, offer something I believe approaches the sacred: testimony about what it is to be human and the importance of working to build your family.