Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Girl Carpenter” is one of five handmade books about my experience working in the construction trades, 1977-1987, and its impact on my life over the decades since.
The stories of the women who broke into the trades have been nearly forgotten; the evidence has almost disappeared from our visual world. “Girl Carpenter” draws on personal photo archives from the 1970s and 1980s, and recent digital images, to tell the story. Photos of different periods and varied quality are processed to sit comfortably together. I also created illustrations from freely available images, processed in Photoshop to create a unified drawn look. The vast majority of publicly available images of women using tools reflect a return to patronizing stereotypes of helplessness. Remembering and preserving this history is an act of resistance against the retrenchment of our time.
The full book can be viewed here
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jenny Helbraun Abramson is a lens-based artist and writer whose work explores the transformative life journey. Her recent projects include photographic objects documenting communal expressions of memory and loss, and handmade books arising from her personal story. “A Unique Motherhood,” a metaphorical telling of her years raising a foster-adopt child, is part of the Griffin Museum of Photography’s 2026 Handmade Photobook Exhibition.
Jenny’s images of the impacts of climate change in her community have been shown widely in California, Hawaii, and in the Fifth National Climate Assessment’s Art X Climate Gallery. Selections from two series, “Emergence” and “WaterWorld,” received honorable mentions in the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, with exhibition in Barcelona in 2023 and 2025.
Jenny studied photography and printmaking at SUNY Purchase School of the Arts and at San Francisco State University. She has lived for 25 years in a home she built with her late husband in Sonoma County, CA.
© Jenny Abramson