Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory - TOC

Whether pasted into an album, framed or shared on social media, the family photograph simultaneously offers a private and public insight into the identity and past of its subject. Long considered a model for understanding individual identity, the idea of the family has increasingly formed the basis for exploring collective pasts and cultural memory. 'Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory' investigates how visual representations of the family reveal both personal and shared histories, evaluating the testimonial and social value of photography and film. Combining academic and creative, practice-based approaches, this collection of essays introduces a dialogue between scholars and artists working at the intersections between family, memory and visual media.

2016

Photography, since its invention, has played an important role in aiding the construction of family image and family memory while also evoking a certain sense of belonging for the members towards their families. The aim of this chapter is to understand with the aid of ethnographic techniques the constitutive role of photography within family life. Using these techniques, involving in-depth interviewing, participant observation and informal conversations, during the very act of looking at photographs, researchers have a chance to examine how family images and memories are hitherto constructed. Researchers can also look into aspects of photography-induced memory recall through photography. Within this framework, I conducted the ieldwork with ive families living in Ankara, Turkey. They were selected as examples of middle and low socioeconomic class families: this enables the researchers to compare different dynamics possibly deriving from social class variations in the family image and...

University of Maine, 2020

My artistic practice and family genealogy create the opportunity for a change in the perception of family history. I seek to illuminate and reframe family history and definitions of self while exploring an alternative to, or an addendum to, the patrilineal model of genealogy. Using the photographs and information gathered from my matrilineal bloodline and my preconceived definitions of self, I have created artworks that are places-of-memory. The places-of-memory, sometimes locations, sometimes objects, or sometimes the interaction with objects in an environment, provide an opportunity for discussion regarding the omitted or dismissed nature of the matrilineal line. This paper outlines the theoretical background of family history and identity, using photographs as methodology. In analyzing my family photographs, I have found I can use photographs as a tangible grounding for exploring abstract concepts such as memory and transgenerational family dynamics. Providing examples of my artwork and the work from a selection of my contemporaries, I show photographs used as a prompt for conversations and the impetus for my artistic practice. The visual components of this thesis work consist of seven portraits of my matrilineal bloodline. The organization of my artwork is modeled after the photo album while managing to challenge the traditional book-bound layout. In place of a book-style format, rendering the work in mediums such as cyanotype, resin molded into cube shapes, and 24inch x 36inch film-negatives creates a new arrangement of the photo album. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/3228

Photography, since its invention, has played an important role in aiding the construction of family image and family memory while also evoking a certain sense of belonging for the members towards their families. The aim of this chapter is to understand with the aid of ethnographic techniques the consti-tutive role of photography within family life. Using these techniques, involving in-depth interviewing, participant observation and informal conversations, during the very act of looking at photographs, researchers have a chance to examine how family images and memories are hitherto constructed. Researchers can also look into aspects of photography-induced memory recall through photography. Within this framework, I conducted the ieldwork with ive families living in Ankara, Turkey. They were selected as examples of middle and low socioeconomic class families: this enables the researchers to compare different dynamics possibly deriving from social class variations in the family image and memory construction processes. The case study in this research includes the issues of producing photographs, displaying photographs, (re)ordering photographs, using photographs and reshaping or destroying photographs related to families. The analysis shows that photography plays a signiicant role in family life, and provides a visual way of inluencing family image as well as its memory along with the cultural aspects of social class, which co-determine the practices of photography and the way the construction process might commence.

2020

My artistic practice and family genealogy create the opportunity for a change in the perception of family history. I seek to illuminate and reframe family history and definitions of self while exploring an alternative to, or an addendum to, the patrilineal model of genealogy. Using the photographs and information gathered from my matrilineal bloodline and my preconceived definitions of self, I have created artworks that are places-of-memory. The places-of-memory, sometimes locations, sometimes objects, or sometimes the interaction with objects in an environment, provide an opportunity for discussion regarding the omitted or dismissed nature of the matrilineal line. This paper outlines the theoretical background of family history and identity, using photographs as methodology. In analyzing my family photographs, I have found I can use photographs as a tangible grounding for exploring abstract concepts such as memory and transgenerational family dynamics. Providing examples of my artw...

This presentation explores what the family photographer chooses to put into an album and how this represents the family in comparison to professional photographer Richard Billingham and Ellinor Carucci

Folklore Forum, 1975

Within the academic field of folklore, photography still goes unrecognized as a folk form.2 Yet, for over a century, people in many parts of the world have been collecting photographs of themselves and their loved ones.3 Since the invention of the first Brownie camera, the activities of making and looking at family photographs have become an integral part of family relationships. The family photograph collection serves as an "archives" of family life --a way of remembering the way people and events used to be, and also a way of passing on these memories to other members of the family. This paper is a report on how photographs are used in one family to preserve and pass on the family heritage. I was not interested in analyzing what the photographs in the collection looked like, although many of them were quite beautiful or humorous, and I found all of them interesting. Rather, f wanted to discover how the family had selected the photographs for their collection and how the photographs were being ueed. I could find nothing in the literature to suggest that other research with these questions hod been done. My research involved three approaches to the material. First, I treated the family's collection of photographs as documents of family life: I interviewed members of the family about the subject matter of the photographs and recorded the life histories family members told. Second, I examined individual hotographs to discover what qualities E might "delight" family members and then I compared my judgement with the family's judgement by asking them direct questions: I asked family members whether they considered individual photographs to be "good" pictures, and why or why not. And finally, I examined the way family history and tradition is relived and passed on through photographs. I included several generations of family members in order to examine how family history was transferred, not only through the individual photographs or the collection, but also through the interaction these artifacts evoked. The Family their Photographs The photograph collection I chose spans five generations of the Hyytiainan-Luostari-Farlow family. This family's collection is probably not unusual; it is an amorphous assortment of labelled and unlabelled photographs, made by a variety of pr6fessional and amateur photographers, that has accumulated in attic trunks, desk drawers, and shoe boxes. As

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0009.106 [http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0009.106] [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/] I have often wondered at the motion and commotion that must go on in a family before it is stilled for a portrait photograph. There is an expected simultaneity in the readiness of all members, caught on camera at the moment when bodies, faces, and thoughts seemingly synchronize. Most of the images in the process of portrait making catch us mid-action, mid-thought, producing bodies in blurred motion, looking away or with eyes shut, akin to what M. V. Portman called a " fuzzygraph. " [1] [#N1] The singular moment of the final portrait coexists with temporal extensions before and after, tempered with permutations in gesture and posture. Embedded in these extensions are clues to the family's logic, its proximities and distances, its politics, its loves and losses. They may not be easy to decode for an outsider, but are familiar to those who have posed for the image. An opportunity to understand the family portrait from the multiple perspectives of the viewer, sitter, critic, and collector offered itself in July 2017, when the artist Dayanita Singh decided to photograph the Sinhas, my parental family. The possibility came as a surprise, for we had known her for more than twenty years, yet she had never before requested to photograph us. [2] [#N2] At a certain defining moment in her career, in the 1990s, Singh made photographs of her friends and family who were similar to herself in class and cultural background, sequencing them in a seminal body of work titled Privacy. [3] [#N3] Naturally, when she asked to photograph us, my frame of reference was that series and I imagined our portrait as a continuation of that project. Despite our professional interests in photography, neither my mother, the art critic and historian Gayatri Sinha, nor I had imagined entering the frame ourselves. Singh's impulse to photograph us, she said, came from the sudden realization that the women in our family, so familiar to her as children and young women, were now growing, transforming, and departing. She had wanted to photograph us before we changed completely from how we had been in a nuclear unit, with my sister and me as children, not adults and mothers, and my mother as mother, not grandmother. This is something she had noticed across the families of several close friends, and she had similarly entered their homes with her camera to hold on to a rapidly passing age. This entailed revisiting some of the families in Privacy, and looking at new subjects among old friends, like us.

Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2011

Zsófia Bán and Hedvig Turai, eds. Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory. AICA: International Association of Art Critics: Hungarian Section: Distributed by Central European University Press, 2010, 193 pp. Reviewed by Katalin Kádár Lynn, Senior Researcher, ELTE.

Art Education, 2010