Brooklyn-based photographer Marisa Chafetz grapples with memory, shifting family dynamics and the groundlessness of her present reality in her series, “We are Ugly but We Have the Music”.

Growing up in what she describes as “a commune of sorts” with three moms, three dads, and seven brothers and sisters, Chafetz remembers her upbringing as idyllic and secure. In recent years, faced with a series of losses, Chafetz has watched her family unravel. “My childhood meant knowing, it meant being sure. Now, right in the thick of it, I’m still staring out at what feels like a sea of uncertainty and change,” she describes. “If my childhood was easy to know, a series of stories so magnificent they sound like fiction—how can I understand my family’s present: often full of heartache, loneliness, and banality? What is the reality of what we are now, after our fall from grace?”

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