Beth Chucker

Beth Chucker is from the Washington, DC area. She received her BFA from The Corcoran College of Art and Design. In 2000, Beth moved to Los Angeles where she achieved a second BFA, with Honors, from Art Center College of Design. In 2009, she received her MFA from ICP-Bard in NYC. This past fall she curated a show at Icon Projects in Los Angeles, called Finding Family. Beth was recently selected to participate in the upcoming exhibition Photography Now 2013 at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY, juried by Kira Pollack, Director of Photography at TIME Magazine. Opening April 13. She currently teaches photography and works freelance in Los Angeles. Below we share her project A Work in Progress.

When I was going in for a D&C I brought my camera as a way to calm and distract myself from the procedure. My husband and I had been pregnant and the fetus had died. We are at the age where we need help to get pregnant. Like many couples today, we have focused on our careers until suddenly, we are on the edge of not being able to conceive. A Work in Progress softens that edge into a meditation and a calming reprieve from medical procedures and visits that create a rhythmic presence in my life. This project is taken from the visual scope of myself as the patient, literally from the viewpoint of what someone would see during a time when they are taking on procedures. These are images that would take the patient away from what is at hand.

Ongoing visits to medical facilities become rituals that create intimate spaces of waiting. A Work in Progress is a documentation of the continuous struggle of a couple trying to create a child. The stage is not only in the doctor’s office, but in the spaces of pause along the way before and after (garages, lobbies, bedrooms, and outdoor spaces) as a way to contemplate medicine and family values in the Western world.

Please view more of Beth’s work on her website.