For eight years, artist Jennifer Teresa Villanueva has photographed the everyday lives of her family, documenting intimate moments of love, care and sacrifice inside their Chicago home. The project began in 2018, after her grandmother was hospitalized, and grew into a personal exploration of the immigrant experience.
NPR asked Villanueva about what inspired the project, the photographs that hold special meaning to her and what she hopes viewers take away from her work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you decide to start this project, and how long have you been working on it?
It started with my abuelita on March 14, 2018.
It was dawn, and I was leaving Chicago for a four-day trip to New York. Before I leave the house, I always pass by my abuelita's bedroom because it is on the way to the front door. That morning, I looked in to make sure she was safely in bed, but she was not there. I assumed she was staying with my aunt in the suburbs. When I returned four days later, and she still was not home, my parents finally told me she had been in the hospital the entire time.
I was devastated, but also frustrated that no one had told me. I called her immediately, and hearing her voice was a relief. The following day, she was discharged and came home with an oxygen tank that she needed to use while sleeping. She was incredibly weak, but by the next day she was already trying to regain her strength. That determination was something I had seen in her my entire life, but I began to look at it differently after that hospitalization, the first of many to come.
At the time, I was taking a large-format photography class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was my first experience with film photography, and I began bringing the camera into our home. At first, I was photographing my grandmother because I wanted to understand her daily life. To pay attention to the small things I had grown accustomed to overlooking. But the more I photographed her, the more I began seeing my entire family through her.
I began thinking about my mother, who worked 12-hour factory shifts and still found ways to care for everyone. I thought about my father's quiet endurance after long days at the factory, and my younger brother, who was growing up lately unaware of the sacrifices happening around him because he was busy being a kid, playing video games, fútbol with his friends, and studying for the future he imagined for himself.
I then think of myself. As an artist, writer and daughter, but also as the family photographer and archivist. I am interested in what happens when the camera enters a home where everyone already knows one another. There is no distance between photographer and subject. I am photographing the people who raised me, and I am also photographing the home that raised me.
Is there one photograph from this series that feels especially meaningful to you? What's the story behind it?
This is difficult for me because every photograph carries a different memory, but the photograph of my abuelita looking at herself in the mirror is especially close to my heart.
During a visit to Chicago in the winter of 2022, while I was an MFA student at the University of Texas at Austin, I asked my abuelita if she had ever been to the Art Institute of Chicago. She looked at me and said, "No, mija, nunca he ido a un museo de arte." I immediately took her. I wanted to show her the museum that had shaped so much of my own understanding of art when I was growing up in Chicago.
As we strolled through the Arts of the Americas galleries, we stopped in front of Ellen Emmet Rand's Woman before the Mirror (1925). I was struck by the woman's posture and the confidence in her gaze. She sat before a mirror as if she were completely aware of herself and her place in the room. I looked at the painting, then at my abuelita, and thought: That is her.
As soon as we arrived home, I wanted to re-create the feeling and painting and make it our own. My abuelita was already dressed for bed in satin pajama pants and a black tank top with lace and sequins that caught the fluorescent light in our living room. I moved her rocking chair from her small bedroom into the living room and placed it in front of the mirror. I barely had to direct her. She simply sat down and looked at her reflection.
The photograph is staged, but it is completely truthful. Everything in it belongs to our home: the cracked walls, the chipped paint around the windows, the smudges on the mirror, the old radiator that carried us through brutal Chicago winters. Our lived-in home began to remind me a lot of my abuelita's abandoned home in Monterrey, Nuevo León. Behind her is a painting of a tiger, which almost feels like a reflection of her own fierce independence and unapologetic strength.
There is also a bruise on her right shoulder, near the arm where she receives dialysis. At night, she usually feels most comfortable wearing a tank top and leaving that arm uncovered. During the day, she often hides it beneath sweaters and long sleeves. Seeing that part of her body in the photograph reminded me that her strength has never meant that she is untouched by pain.
My abuelita goes through dialysis three or four times a week, and yet, there she was in front of the mirror, wearing her pearls and sequins, looking radiant and entirely herself. The pearls were a gift from her best friend, Don Emilio, whom she met through dialysis and unfortunately passed away. To her, they represent protection, wisdom and good luck.
I think that is what I wanted to preserve in the photograph. Not an image of illness, but an image of my grandmother looking back at herself and continuing to recognize the woman she has always been.
What has surprised you most while working on this project? Has it changed the way you think about yourself or your family?
What surprised me the most was how supportive my family became when I started carrying a camera around them.
I do not remember having a formal conversation with them about becoming the person who photographs our family. It happened gradually, and collaboratively. I would bring the camera into the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the backyard — even, at times, outside around our neighborhood running errands, and even to their workplace.
On the other hand, my father was not comfortable with being photographed at first. He was a private person, and our home is an incredibly vulnerable place to be photographed. Over time, especially during a tragic event, he began to understand that I was not trying to expose him. I was trying to honor him.
A photograph that comes to mind is one I made with a 13-second exposure while my father had fallen asleep watching fútbol. He had just come home from his job as a tool-and-die maker at a factory. His work clothes, lunch box and duffel bag were still there, and the television glowed and cast this luminous green light across the room. It is such an ordinary scene, but I grew up watching that exact routine. Sometimes I think that was one of the few places where I could see him completely let go.
Photography has made me more aware of how much of our family life was communicated through these routines rather than through communication. My mother shows love by working, cooking, sending money to family in Mexico, and making sure everyone has what they need. My father shows love through endurance and providing. My grandmother shows love by continuing to participate in family life even when her body is asking her to slow down.
I also never expected the photographs to travel as far as they have. I am the first person in my family that is an artist, pursuing a college degree, and eventually a master's degree. I have been part of prestigious programs and exhibitions, and now my father tells people that his daughter is an artist. He talks about these things with a pride that I don't think he always knows how to express directly to me.
That means a lot to me. The camera began as a way of paying attention to my family, but it has also become something we share. I think we all slowly realized that our ordinary life was worth remembering and sharing.
What format and equipment did you use to make these photographs, and why did you choose to work that way?
My first introduction to film photography wasn't through a 35mm camera. It was through a 4x5 large-format camera at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I remember carrying that enormous camera around our small house and trying to find enough space to set it up. I would practically be pressed against the wall. It was frustrating, awkward and completely fascinating to me.
Working with a large-format camera also changed the way I understood photographing my family. Everything took time. I had to set up the camera, compose the image depending on the scene in the house, check the exposure, and then ask someone I loved to remain in place while I worked. I remember asking my grandmother to hold a pose for what felt like 20 minutes. I was always conscious that I did not want her to become uncomfortable, but something about this experience she shared with me made her meditative.
Eventually, I knew I had to work with a handheld film camera, something close to a 4x5 large-format camera, but not a 35mm film camera. I found a Mamiya RB67 on eBay, a camera I never worked with before, and completely changed the trajectory of this body of work. I am drawn to film because it slows me down. When I know I have a limited number of exposures, I become more attentive to the moment before I make the photograph. I look longer. I think about the ambient lighting, the gesture, the expression and what is happening outside the frame and how to preserve it.
Color is also important to me. The warm tones of our home, the fluorescent lights, the colors of their clothing, the food on the table, the wallpaper, furniture and objects all become part of the emotional and cultural language of the photographs.
I had to switch to digital in recent years. Film became more expensive over time, and a digital camera helped me quickly photograph our daily routine and events in our lives. That did not change the way a photograph asks of the person in front of the camera. I often photograph the same domestic spaces repeatedly, especially our kitchen. For a long time, I wondered if I was photographing the same room too much. Eventually, I realized that the room was never actually the same. My grandmother might be in the center of the dining table, her gaze at the camera, while everyone around her is enjoying their meal. My mother might be preparing dinner before going to work. The architecture remains, but the people, light, gestures and circumstances constantly change. The room becomes a kind of stage for family life without ever being theatrical.
Whether an image is carefully staged or happens unexpectedly, I want it to retain the feeling of the place where it was made. The scratches on a table, a chipped window frame, a lunch box left on the floor or a dish sitting in the sink can tell me as much about my family as a portrait can. I have come to accept that I am my family's photographer and archivist. The camera is not separate from our daily life. It is something that lives with us.
What was the most challenging part of making this project?
The most challenging part has always been balancing myself as the photographer with being the eldest daughter in my family.
There are moments when I am holding the camera and I know there is much more happening outside of the frame than I could ever photograph. There are family histories, difficult conversations, illnesses, sacrifices, responsibilities and generational wounds that exist alongside the ordinary moments I am trying to preserve. Sometimes I have to decide whether I am looking at my family as an artist or simply being their daughter.
But two identities have never really been separate for me.
I grew up going to the Art Institute of Chicago and remember walking through the galleries and looking at European and American paintings and photographs, trying to comprehend what a family could look like in art. I rarely saw homes that looked like mine or domestic lives that reflected the experiences of an immigrant family in the United States. I did not see many images of people who looked like my parents, my grandmother, or myself simply existing in the intimate spaces that make up our home and everyday lives.
So when I first picked up a camera, my instinct was to photograph what was closest to me.
The challenge is that these photographs are not neutral to me. I know what happened before the shutter opened and what happened after it closed. I know when someone was tired, when someone was worried, when someone did not want to be photographed, or when a seemingly ordinary moment carried so much weight and a much larger history.
I also grew up with the expectation that I should work hard enough to give something back. Education became a fundamental responsibility for me. Pursuing college, an MFA, a life as an artist was never only an individual ambition. It was connected to everything my family had sacrificed to make my and my brother's opportunities possible.
Photography has forced me to sit with that inheritance rather than simply move past it. Sometimes the camera feels like a responsibility. Sometimes it feels like gratitude. And sometimes it is simply the way I know how to say I want to honor you. This mattered to me.
What do you hope people come away with after seeing these images?
This body of work stems from an immigrant household, where migration is part of our history, but it is not the entirety of our lives. I hope that people see and feel the tenderness, exhaustion, humor, beauty, stubbornness, routine and intimacy that exist inside a family. I grew up understanding my family through the things they did for one another to survive. Someone was always cooking, working, cleaning, translating, driving someone somewhere, waiting in a hospital room, helping with homework or making room at the table. Oftentimes, that was me, with or without a camera. These actions can look ordinary from the outside, but they are the ways my family has learned to care for and survive together.
At the same time, I cannot separate that care from the conditions that shaped my family's life. My family came to the United States and spent much of their lives working factory jobs, raising a family, sending money back home and navigating a country that often asks immigrant families to prove that they belong. I grew up translating documents and conversations for my family, and I learned early that things like language, work, healthcare, legal status and access to resources can become deeply personal when they enter the home. These photographs are shaped by those realities. The home is a place where larger political and socioeconomic realities become intimate.
I think about how much of an immigrant family's history can live in what is not photographed: the work that someone takes because it is available, the money sent home, the forms someone else has to translate, the hours spent caring for a sick relative, or the decisions a family makes about where and how to build a life. For me, photographing these things is a way of paying attention and honoring the people who live inside those realities and hardships, rather than allowing their lives to be reduced to them.
I am the daughter with the camera. I think about Mexico often, especially when I return to Monterrey, where my family is from. On one trip, I was walking through my parents' old neighborhood, Colonia Emiliano Zapata, with one of my tías. She pointed out the church where my parents were married. I had grown up looking at photographs from their wedding, so standing inside that church felt strangely familiar and completely foreign at the same time.
As I was leaving, I noticed a banner above an image of Mother Teresa. It read, "¿Quieres salvar el mundo? Empieza por tu familia." That sentence stayed with me. I took a photograph, and it eventually became the title of this body of work: ¿Quieres Salvar Al Mundo? Empieza por tu Familia / Do You Want to Save the World? Start with Your Family.
For me, it is not a literal instruction to save the world. It is a way of thinking about how change begins in the place we are close to. It begins with how we care for one another, how we remember one another and how we make room for another to be vulnerable.
My hope is that someone looking at these photographs might think about their own chosen or given family, not necessarily because their story looks like mine, but because they recognize something familiar in the way we care, work, worry, gather or carry one another. I think that is ultimately what these photographs are trying to preserve and pay homage to: not only where my family came from, but how we became a family together, making a life between two countries and within the complicated promise of the American dream.
Jennifer Teresa Villanueva is a photographer and artist based in New York. Find more of her work on her website, jennifertvillanueva.com, or on Instagram, at @jennifer__teresa
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