In 1966, Joanne Leonard photographed her sister-in-law, Sonia, hanging laundry out to dry. As Sonia reaches up to attach a clothespin to the line, the morning sunlight illuminates her pregnant form, which is just visible beneath a white shift dress. In this otherwise banal action, the artist finds a poignant moment, yet also captures an unspoken narrative: Leonard’s frustrated desire to have children of her own during this period.

Sonia (pregnant woman hanging laundry) demonstrates Leonard’s notion of “intimate documentary,” a stylistic framework in which, according to the artist, she depicts “the intimate realities of life as they are lived and allow[s] them to touch and be touched by the world at large.” Women are often the focus of Leonard’s images. By showing women in socially circumscribed roles as mothers and housewives, the artist gives visibility and validation to domestic labor. “As I look back,” she wrote later, “I realize that I was fashioning a feminist art practice before I really understood what such a practice might be.”

While this photograph was daring in its representation of the female form in late-stage pregnancy in the 1960s, it has been critiqued in recent years for romanticizing pregnancy. In her 2008 photo-memoir, Being in Pictures, Leonard commented, “Today, I would more readily consider that some women experience impoverishment or subjugation from the very state I longed for and celebrated in this image.”