The very genesis of the Work-Life project is a collaboration between a sociologist and a documentary photographer: Sara Dorow and Martin Weinhold. The two met in 2018 while Weinhold was visiting the University of Alberta Sociology Department for a presentation on his recent work, but they did not start working together until 2020.

The Work-Life Project builds on Weinhold's singular Workspace Canada photography collection, which was largely inspired by political scientist Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition. In it she distinguishes between different qualities of work and their varying potential for realizing our human capacities within a limited lifetime. Martin’s work then seeks to capture how work shapes life models, and how, in that respect, people use their limited time in a society where gainful employment is to some degree mandatory.

In 2019, Martin was preparing to finish his fieldwork for the Workspace Canada project with a trip to the Yukon, but his tour was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Martin was locked away from his subject matter, Canada, for two years, and largely felt that his project of photographing Canadian workers was over and done. However, it was about this time that Martin and Sara connected and began talking about a potential collaboration. Sara was captured by the idea that Martin had documented people in almost the entire country before COVID. They came to the idea of revisit these people to see what was happening in their working lives now. The original motivation for the Work-Life Project was to make the most comprehensive artistic and sociological description of Canadian workers as possible with multi-faceted timeless portraits, intimate interviews, and vivid sounds.

The Work-Life in Canada team was assembled and funding was secured—first a Killam Cornerstone Grant and then a SSHRC Insight Grant—to launch this ambitious project. Weinhold and Dorow, along with a team of co-investigators and collaborators from five universities are now returning to a representative cross-section of the original participants to add a second set of photos, a work-life narrative interview, and workplace soundscape recordings.