Most families don’t have their parents’ FBI files in dusty boxes. Mine does.

This project describes the legacy of my parents’ participation in radical leftist groups, including Weatherman, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the Venceremos Brigade, that sought to overthrow imperialism and capitalism through organizing and revolution.

My photographs of their propaganda, surveillance records, snapshots and current lives describe their activism, and subsequent turn toward family life, from an intimate distance.

Joan and Jed fell in love while planning a 60,000-person demonstration in 1976 (their friends joked it would never last: my mom was a Marxist, my dad an anarcho-communist). The story of their activism is the story of me.

They believed that another world was possible, that together they could forge a more just future for humanity. Their utopian dreams of Marxist-Leninism, feminism and justice are deeply compelling – but intensely rigid.

Weatherman bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department and the New York Police Headquarters. They issued communiques and rioted to bring down the US government. The FBI was intensely focused on this small group of mostly white college students, tapping phones, surveilling members and attempting to infiltrate the organization.

Eventually, many of these activists expected to raise radical children, too. This heritage inspires me, but it can also be oppressive, with enormous pressure to hew to the party line. Our family unit was its own political movement, nation-state, culture and system of belief.

Mainstream histories of Weatherman focus on curdled utopianism, charismatic individuals, flower children gone druggy and dark. But my family’s archive offers a fuller understanding. Violence and dogma played their part in the movement, but so did a beautiful dream of shared labor, equity and justice. These personal items also show unyielding expectations, but also familial love and loyalty, humor, and a search for nuance.

Can I live up to these expectations? Do I want to? Which parts of these perspectives will I keep, and what will I discard?