When Susan Ressler returned home from photographing a Native American community in northern Canada, something didn’t sit well. She had been there for three months in 1973 with an anthropologist, following families as they battled alcoholism and poverty. She had dreamed of becoming a documentary photographer like Dorothea Lange, but her time in Canada left her questioning her privileged status as a photographer.

“Here I was photographing these impoverished people and they didn’t have any sense of where I was coming from and what I might do with those photographs, how it might affect them,” she said. “I started thinking about how much documentary photography is from a position of looking down on somebody who has less power.”

So what would happen if she flipped the narrative and photographed scenes apropos of her own upper-middle-class background?