The Building a Family Series

Building a Family is a five-volume collection of documentary photography and oral history that traces the arc of family life through marriage, childrearing and aging with honesty, reverence, and deep humanity. Drawn from five decades of work by photographer/interviewer Mary Motley Kalergis, each volume can stand alone or resonate more deeply when read as part of the whole. From the vows of With This Ring: A Portrait of Marriage to the threshold of Giving Birth, from the courage of Considering Adoption to the perspectives of Mother: A Collective Portrait and Seen & Heard: Teenagers Talk About Their Lives, these books portray families not in theory, but in lived experience.

Originally launched across different years and publishing houses, the volumes have now been carefully unified in design and presentation by Atelerix Press. The series does not idealize but, rather, bears witness by listening, seeing, and reflecting. What emerges is a mosaic of testimony: portraits and voices that, taken together, offer a meditation on how people become a family. This work invites the reader not only to observe but to remember and recognize — to see, perhaps, something of themselves in these stories of love, labor, choice, and change.