While working towards her BFA from the California Institute of Art in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Carrie Mae Weems began taking documentary-style photographs of her extended family. The images, which would became Family Pictures and Stories -- her first comprehensive body of work – depicted the realities of their lives: moments of hardships and joy in equal measure. In Mom at Work, Weems captured her mother, Carrie Polke, in a moment of laughter while at her factory job. Other images in the series show her seated on her father’s lap and a large family reunion, a collective portrait which poignantly contested the narrative of the fractured Black family.