Paraded in ranks on the mantelpiece or safely stowed away, family photographs stand in for the extended family, now dispersed. Looking at a family album often prompts nostalgia, a dream of a return ‘home’ to an idealized golden past, where the sun shone and everyone smiled. In forgetting the directorial role of the photographer, recycled notions of what makes a ‘good’ photograph, and the technical limitations of the
A family album contains a micro-history of photography as a medium and a variety of genres, as interpreted by a succession of photographers both professional and amateur. In the first decades of photography's history, most likenesses were made by professionals, from studio cartes de visite and cabinet portraits to seaside tintypes. But from the appearance of the roll-film Kodak in 1888 onwards, the potential scope of family photography vastly widened, guided (in theory) by proliferating how-to-do-it manuals and industry advertising (‘Save your happy memories with a Kodak’). The number of photographs produced increased, although the themes remained much the same. Two late 20th-century developments, instant and then digital photography, removed third-party processing from picture making. Today, imaging companies using digital manipulation promise to ‘enhance’ family-album mythology by offering ‘seamless, permanent, and reassuring solutions to torn and separated memories’, ‘cosmetic perfection’, and even the opportunity to ‘remove any trace of your ex-husband, ex-wife or ex-lover’.
Editorial control of family photographs—which may include selection, disposal, captioning, and arrangement—is wielded by the archivist, most often the mother, whose preferences are perhaps guided by an unconscious desire to provide evidence of her own good mothering. The conflicts and power struggles inherent in family life are repressed. Like a public-relations document or a Christmas circular, the family album (or box of CD-Rs) mediates between family members, providing a united front to the world, affirming successes, celebrations, and togetherness. It is bound within established codes of commemorative convention, so ubiquitous that they are taken for granted, even minutely reconstructed and sold back to us in advertising. But these ritually happy images may conceal harrowing realities. Michael Lesy has described the excitement and pain involved in discussing other people's family photographs: ‘Sometimes I'd hear stories and see pictures that didn't hit me for two days; but once they did, I'd have a hard time answering the phone or walking into a drugstore. There were some stories that were so misshapen and horrendous that I destroyed the [interview] tapes and never even borrowed the pictures…. But in every case, the people told me stories; they spoke parables; they made confessions…. They told me the way things really are.’
Viewed collectively, family photographs can be seen as social documents. In Britain from the 1970s, personal snaps were used as resource materials by radical history movements concerned to write the previously hidden, ‘dissonant’ histories of women, the working class, and ethnic minorities. Exploring people's ordinary lives through such everyday documents provided recognition of community histories with shared cultural values. However, individual family stories may be more complex, incorporating hybridity, migration, and cultural mixing. Individual images hold layers of different meanings and are subject to pressures from outside the frame, which are legible only if the social, cultural, and personal contexts are considered. Sometimes family picture collections are plundered, often without a critical context, merely to evoke notions of the past.
One's own family photographs hold a poignant fascination, linked to memory, forgetting, and loss. They are symbols of place and change, they remind us of the past and reconnect us to the familiar. These images may be used critically as material for interpretation in ‘memory work’, whilst being aware of the silences, absences, and contradictions inherent in any collection. New narratives may be explored that go beyond the mediation of the photograph to question identities and taken-for-granted memories.
— Rosy Martin
Bibliography
- Lesy, M., Time Frames: The Meaning of Family Pictures (1980).
- Spence, J., and Holland, P. (eds.), Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography (1991).
- Kenyon, D., Inside Amateur Photography (1992).
- Kuhn, A., Family Secrets (1995)
