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.