The Model Wife

A very specific sub-genre to photographers who shoot their families is photographs of spouses. The collaboration between a photographer and his/her spouse explores the complicated relationship that exists within a marriage. The Model Wife, an exhibition and book put together by Arthur Ollman of the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego in 2001, focuses on male photographers whose wives act as muses in their work.

Personally, I am not a fan of the title of this book and exhibition. “Model wife” has some patriarchal pre-feminist connotations for me. While I think Ollman was just trying to make a clever word play, it also opens the door to why only male photographers are included here. Certainly female photographers also photograph their husbands (Sally Mann, Elinor Carucci to name a few). But their images of their spouses are not as cemented in the photographic canon as their male counterparts. Traditionally, in the realm of family photography, female photographers are celebrated for their work revolving around their children and their roles as mothers, while men it seems are celebrated for photographing their wives. I realize that is quite a broad statement, but in my years of interest in this area of photography and my time researching the material for this blog, it does seem to be a recurring theme.

Excerpt from the book The Model Wife, by Arthur Ollman, Director of the Museum of Photographic Art

“Lee Friedlander is not a romantic. He is incompatible with sentimentality in art. It is interesting then, to look at his photographs of his wife Maria. He has photographed her for 40 years. Is this work free of nostalgia and romanticism, is it all just visual curiosity?

Friedlander was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington. His mother died when he was seven. His father felt unable to raise him and sent him to live with a farmer about 110 miles south of Seattle, where he grew up. He met Maria de Paoli in 1957. He was twenty-three, she twenty-four. She was a child of an Italian neighborhood in New York, surrounded by the tumult of family and community. Working at Sports Illustrated as an editorial assistant, she ran into the young Lee Friedlander who was trying to get assignments at the magazine.

The photographs of Maria are notably free of some of Friedlander's most typical attitudes. The images usually feature Maria as the dominant figure of a relatively simple scene. The frames tend not to be cluttered. They are intimate, participatory views. Lee Friedlander is cool, even diffident, but his warmth is showing at the center of his life. (left: Lee Friedlander, Arches National Park, Utah, 1972, gelatin silver print, collection Museum of Photographic Arts)

Maria is seen calmly, dignified, alert, and gently admired. She often shows eye contact -- she was given an instant to compose herself -- in essence to create her own self-portrait. She is seen as a daughter, a cousin, a wife, a mother, a reader, a homemaker, a regular and companionable traveling partner. While rarely presented sexually, it is clear she is loved. The images are often sensual, and tactile references abound. In one, her daughter brushes her hair. In another, Maria sleeps in the sun, shadows gently brushing her cheek in a cafe. Friedlander's art identifies a solid, trusting family structure. His selection of daily observation reaches high poetry.

Friedlander's pictures of Maria show that even in his uninflected way of picture making, with its trope of neutrality and curiosity, that love and dependence are absolutely unlike other emotions. Love looks different than simple curiosity. Tenderness and respect, no matter how alloyed with other complex emotions, are inconsistent with neutrality. The photographs of Maria Friedlander illustrate affection that is both apparent and considerable. She has been shown to be an attractive, intense, intelligent, and loved partner. No other person appears as often in his work and no other personality is as fully described. For more than forty years, the Friedlanders continue to produce this extraordinary group of images, so long as Maria continues to ‘get in front of’ his camera.”

More excerpts from The Model Wife available online at: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa373.htm

The Model Wife book was produced in conjunction with a traveling exhibition by the same name at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA. The book’s author and director of the museum is Arthur Ollman. Ollman is also a photographer, whose work can be found here.

When Family Photos Go Awry

Family portraits and snapshots are ubiquitous in our culture. They record each of our histories and act as tangible artifacts for our memories. Though, it could be argued that some of those memories might have best been forgotten. Everyone I know, myself included, have photos from our pasts that transcend embarrassment; images so bad they become priceless gems of awkward hilarity.

No proper collection of family photography would be complete without Awkward Family Photos. It's good to laugh at yourself.

As I mentioned, we all have photos like these. It wouldn't be fair for me to post these photos of strangers for your amusement without sharing some of my own awkward moments:

Me looking up my sister's skirt.

Yes, that is a tiger tied to a tree for the kiddies to pet. Just another Easter egg hunt in Texas.

No comment.

Nick Nixon & The Brown Sisters

Nicholas Nixon's best-known work, The Brown Sisters, chronicles his wife Bebe and her three sisters in an ongoing series of group portraits taken each year since 1975. That first image shows the four sisters lined up in an order that is echoed in all their subsequent portraits.

As a whole, the portraits allow the viewer to experience the passage of time in the faces and bodies of these women, as well as their changing fashions and settings. The press release for the exhibition of this work at the National Gallery in Washington, DC in 2006 states: "While the photographs have their roots in family snapshots, the rigor of the artist and the commitment of the women to the project transcend their heritage to create a moving testament of human relationships" (National Gallery website).

In his book Home, Nixon writes: "If I like what I see, I have to make a photograph of it. I just can't help myself. That, and because I love them so much, are why there are so many pictures of my home and my family" (Nixon 1). Being a photographer who also has taken pictures of my family over the years, I love the simplicity of this explanation. The Brown Sisters at its core, is about the love between these sisters. "It's an appealing, romantic vision of family. We want to be Browns. We want to share their divine sisterhood. We want to feel what the 32d year of friendship is like" (Green).

Click to view all The Brown Sister portraits.

Works Cited:

Green, Tyler. "In His Pictures, We Watch the Years Go By on Four Sister's Faces," The Boston Globe. 4 December 2006.

National Gallery website.

Nixon, Nick. Home. Belgium: Lodima Press, 2006.

Update: British photographer Idris Khan makes art about art, with his image superimposing the Nixon portraits, entitled every ... Nicholas Nixon's Brown Sisters.

Photographing My Father

"I can remember the peculiar feeling I had looking at the first pictures that I made of him. I was recreating him and, like a parent with an infant, I had the power to observe him knowing that I would not be observed myself. Photographing my father became a way of confronting my confusion about what it is to be a man in this culture."

- Larry Sultan, from "Pictures from Home" (18).

In January of 2010, I began photographing my father. Over the past decade, I have made a number of portraits of myself, my two sisters, my mother, and my grandmother, but never him. As the sole male member of our immediate family, he has always been something of an outsider surrounded by women. Additionally, since he graduated from college, my father has worked as a traveling telephone pole salesman. It is the job that brought him to Texas, my birthplace, and where he still lives today with my mom and his mom.

Growing up, Dad was often on the road. His territory extended northwest to Colorado, through Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri, down south through Memphis, circling back home to Houston by way of New Orleans. When the company he worked for all his career laid him off a few years back, he staved off early retirement by joining forces with his previous competitor. He is still on the road and claims to have a few more years of driving and flying and selling left in him.

As a photographer, I often travel on road trips in search of new photographs. Only recently has it occurred to me that this impulse to explore America, at least on some level, is my attempt to retrace my father's steps. My current project, and the reason why I final turned my lens on the man himself, revolves around the idea of the lone business traveler. I am interested in exploring, through my perspective as a daughter and a photographer, the private life and solitary memories of a man who has lived, in part, on the road. That is not to say that I am in search of the literal truth, but rather my version of it. As much as this work with my father is a collaboration and we have discussed my motivations, it is at its core my perspective. As Irving Sultan, Larry's father, said to his son in the pages of "Pictures from Home": "Honestly, I'm happy to help you with your project, but for the most part that's not me that I recognize in those pictures...What you call introspection looks to me like lost, empty...I'm not melancholy...I think that's your fantasy" (Sultan 114).

And what exactly are my motivations with this work? As much as I aim for this work to be about the archetype of "the salesman", collective loneliness, and the desperation and disillusionment of becoming obsolete, I can not fully separate my photographer role from my identity as a daughter. While I hope that this project when complete will speak to a larger idea beyond my family unit, I am just happy and grateful for these images of my dad. As Andre Bazin stated, "photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time" (9). That impulse to stop time has always been there. It is why I photograph so much every time I go home. Like Sultan, and I would argue like any photographer who photographs his or her family, "I want my parents to live forever" (Sultan 18).

Click here to listen to Larry Sultan on NPR discussing "Pictures from Home".

Read Alec Soth's touching tribute to Larry Sultan on his Little Brown Mushroom blog.

Works Cited:

Bazin, Andre. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," What is Cinema?, ed. & trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Sultan, Larry. Pictures from Home. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

Sally Mann on Photographing Her Children

In this short segment from Ovation TV's six-part series "Genius of Photography", Sally Mann discusses the experience of photographing her children, her motivations in doing so, and how these photographic collaborations have affected their relationship.

Introduction

“I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases - but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing...the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!”

- Elizabeth Barrett (Sontag 200)

1843, letter to Mary Russell Mitford

“Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.”

- Emmet Gowin (Sontag 200)

“Picture book, pictures of your mama, taken by your papa a long time ago.”

- “Picture Book” by The Kinks (Davies)

The family photo album, composed of snapshots taken by its members, usually the parents, chronicles the events and holidays in that family’s history. Images of birthdays, new babies, holidays, new cars, and vacations memorialize the high points in that history. The album is a place where a family can build its own mythology. Often the photographs inside are posed with subjects performing for the camera, answering the order to “say cheese”. Whether posed portraits or candid snapshots, these images construct a person’s primary visual identity and place within a family unit. “Shooting photographs and home videos of our relatives and partners is one of our most pervasive and enduring social customs - one that with the advent of digital photography and the emailing of pictures, has become ever more entangled in the fabric of our daily life” (Rugoff 9).

The main impetus behind family photography is preservation. “Take one picture and stop time, preserve the moment. Take enough pictures over enough time, however, and they may eventually shape, perhaps even transform, the way life is lived and commemorated” (Bussard 9). Photography is a means for recording one’s life and creating a tangible object of a passing moment. At its core, photographs of loved ones are made in part to freeze time; to defy the inevitability of death.

In the creation of a family’s visual history, it is just as important as what a family chooses to photograph as what ends up in the albums. While a family’s photographic record is usually begun by the parents or one parent, over time as its members age, the family unit as a whole acts as the albums’ editors. Each member weighing in on what representations of themselves they wish to preserve. Unflattering shots or tainted memories may be pulled out of the record books. Likewise, aspects of a family member’s life outside the domestic arena may never be seen. Work life is often left out of a family album. Death, trauma, sickness, sexuality, and familial tension too do not often grace the scrapbook pages. The implication being that the focus should be on the good times, the milestones, the passage of time on the faces of those we hold dear.

In the words of Robert Frank: “You can photograph anything now" (Sontag 187). The visual record of a family changes when one of its members is a photographer. Artists like Larry Sultan, Sally Mann, Emmet Gowin, Tina Barney, Harry Callahan, and Nick Nixon “offer us glimpses into their own private realities” through their work (Bussard 9). By using domestic life and family members as a means for exploring deeper issues of identity and memory, these artists blur the line between public life and private life.

The purpose of this blog is to create a digital scrapbook which explores the relationship between family albums and photo books and projects made by photographers of their own families. The decision to present the collected material as a blog was inspired by the growing use of this format as a means of sharing family photographs. In addition to my own personal essays on this genre, I plan to expand the blog’s scope to include links to others’ essays, as well as related multimedia and video pieces. If you would like to contribute an essay or share a link, please contact me at: sara@saramacel.com.

Works Cited:

Bussard, Katherine A. "Personal Stories, Public Pictures." So The Story Goes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Davies, Ray. "Picture Book." The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Reprise, 1968.

Rugoff, Ralph. "Shooting the Family." Shoot the Family. New York: Independent Curators International, 2006.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.