Collected Visions

In a similar vein as the family ancestry online photo archives, artist Lorie Novak created Collected Visions, a web-based art piece on family photography and shared cultural histories as explored through snapshots. Lorie was my teacher at NYU and is an amazing artist, mentor, and friend.

From the Collected Visions website:

"The concept for Collected Visions grew out of the photographs and installations Lorie Novak has been creating since the early 1980s. She uses family snapshots and images from the media to explore the relationships between personal and collective memory. Lorie Novak curates the exhibitions in the CV Gallery and maintains the CV Museum. Because the concept of "truth" is a complicated one, the ownership of the snapshots is not identified beyond what is written in the essays. The majority of submitted stories are posted--the goal of the site is to be a place of diverse voices."

Visit Collected Visions here.

Submit images and essays to Collected Visions here.

Old Family Photos

There are many resources online for people to submit their old family photos for the main purposes of historical reference and family ancestry. While the web design of this particular site leaves a lot to be desired, it is a great resource of old family photography searchable by surnames, school names, categories (there's a section just for circus photos!), and a link to help people search for their long-lost relatives.

A Year of Lex - my vote for the best new baby book

Two very creative first-time parents made this Youtube video of their baby's first year. I thought it was a clever take on a baby book. And yeah, so what if it made me cry happy tears.

Tina Barney

"What people see in my pictures comes from the fact that I care very much about my subjects, and know the environment, the surroundings, and the lifestyle because it's my life. I don't think anyone else could do quite what I do."

"Since I have a view camera, that takes a certain amount of planning. The first step is always to find my vantage point, where i stand, which designates my attitude about the situation...The amount of courage I have in directing people depends on who I'm photographing."

"Metaphorically, [the photographs] might be my way of saying, 'Everything looks fine here, but be careful because it all could crumble.' "

"I do have my own palette. I give credit to my mother, who was a model and is an interior decorator. She has an extraordinary sense of color, and a lot of the interiors in my photographs happen to have been done by her."

"It seems to me that there are viewers out there who actually care about the people in my pictures. They definitely can relate to them, and I love that idea."

"I love it when people call the subjects by their first names, like soap opera stars or movie stars, and that they realize how much I care about them- also, that they might see what is important to me, which is how these people get along with each other. It's not the lifestyle and the interiors and those kinds of small things that matter."

"That's really my primary concern - to investigate how one person treats another...I also want to show them how I feel about them."

-All quotes by Tina Barney from the Smithsonian Series book Friends and Relations: Photographs by Tina Barney, 1991.

Larry Mann by Sally Mann

Originally published in The New Yorker's Sept. 21, 2009 issue:

Family of Mann by Vince Aletti

"Although Sally Mann’s husband, Larry, made occasional appearances in “Immediate Family,” the photographs that made her famous, he played a supporting role to the three uninhibited children cavorting at center stage. But he’s the sole focus of Mann’s new show at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery—a series of nude studies that regard the strength and fragility of the aging male body with extraordinary tenderness. “I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal,” Mann writes. The process may be intimate and collaborative, but the pictures are hers alone. Larry’s head is rarely seen; it’s his body that Sally details bit by bit, in photographs that look like nineteenth-century relics. She exaggerates the imperfections of the antique glass-plate process until the surfaces of her images suggest flayed, eroded, or pockmarked flesh. Larry’s body, though worn down by muscular dystrophy, remains sturdy and broad. Appearing in fragments, he’s as magnificent as shards of Greek statuary, and all the more heroic for his vulnerability."

I had the pleasure of meeting Sally and Larry Mann at their Three Graces farm in Virginia in 2003. I was there as a photo assistant helping out my then boss Bruce Davidson who was on assignment from Newsweek to shoot a portrait of Mrs. Mann. Upon our arrival, Larry rode up to us on horseback as Sally made her way from the house surrounded by greyhounds. After the shoot, they cooked us dinner and we sat out on their porch eating venison and drinking what even what my uncultured 23-year-old palate could tell was really good wine. They are a magical couple, and I'll always be grateful I got to tag along on that hot summer day.

Portrait of Larry by Sally Mann from 1977

Playing with Pictures: Victorian Photocollage

On view now through May 9th at the Met is a small, but fascinating show of Victorian era photocollage called "Playing with Pictures."

Made in England during the 1860s-1870s, this collection of album pages and watercolor paintings explores mixed media in surreal collages. The work was produced almost exclusively by women of the aristocracy using cut-up carte de visite images of family and friends. Their playful, subversive melding of painting, drawing, and photography into surrealist scenes predates the avant-garde art scene by decades (Siegel 13).

This work has been rarely exhibited or appreciated, having suffered from "the double indignity of being the product of both industrial photography and feminine craft" ( Siegel 14). Only recently has Victorian photocollage received attention by art historians interested in vernacular photography and feminist scholars seeking to recognize female artists "peripheral to art history" (Siegel 14).

These images contain elements that have become central issues in the evolution of photography: the cut-out figures from various sittings are a break from the one-point perspective of Renaissance paintings (Siegel 32); in placing these figures into imaginary scenes, the tableau vivant approach to photography is referenced (Weiss 37); not to mention the very act of cutting and pasting as a precursor to Photoshop. I love how these photocollages of the Victorian era are dealing with all these issues that went on to become part of the modernist movement, yet their makers' intentions were much more to do with wit and whimsy. "In Victorian albums, photographs were manipulated not for artistic purpose, but for the pleasurable and empowering strategy of refusing to deal with meaning seriously, in favor of the delights of play" (Di Bello 60).

Works Cited:

Di Bello, Patrizia. "Photocollage, Fun, and Flirtations." Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage." Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.

Siegel, Elizabeth. "Society Cutups." Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage." Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.

Weiss, Marta. "The Page as Stage." Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage." Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.

Photographer George Rippon on Family

Family from George Rippon on Vimeo.

Don't miss at 4:55 for the BBC clip of Larry Sultan and his father discussing "Pictures from Home."

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.