Most families don't have their parents' FBI files in dusty boxes. Alice Proujansky's does. Hard Times are Fighting Times describes the legacy of Proujansky's parents' participation in radical leftist groups like Weatherman, the Native American Solidarity Committee and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee that sought to overthrow imperialism and capitalism through organising and revolution. Proujansky began work on the project in the late twenty-tens, photographing her parents' propaganda archive, surveillance records, family snapshots and current lives, describing their activism, and subsequent turn toward family life, from an intimate distance. She writes: 'My parents fell in love while planning a sixty-thousand-person demonstration in the mid-seventies (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. Radicals like my parents believed that another world was possible, that together they could forge a more just future for humanity. Their utopian dreams of Marxist-Leninism, feminist rigour and fairness are deeply compelling—but also intensely rigid.' The book weaves Proujansky's photographs of her parents in old age with archival documents and FBI surveillance files, presenting a layered family history of the American left.