Family [antikvár]

Facing One's Own hy Henri Peretz The family has a dual status. It is both a legal structure and the framework for interpersonal relationships, and in recent times more emphasis has been placed on its emotional than its institutional aspects. The connections between the family and photography have been evident since the invention of the medium; photography quickly became a family activity, and the family photograph was one of its recurrent subjects. The family photograph falls into four different genres. From the start, professional photographers, frequently working in a studio, provided those celebrating significant moments in their lives with images of themselves. These portraits of newly-weds and new babies make up the family albums that have been kept and handed down from generation to generation. They follow set rules governing background decor and the way the figures are arranged, rules that define a genre that was imposed on obedient subjects. During the nineteenth century, while photographic procedures remained complicated, the studio photographer had a near-monopoly in this field. Then came a number of technical advances. In 1854, photographs made using small-format glass plates began to appear on visiting cards. These cartes-des-visites were exchanged and disseminated, and had to be presented in some way; a book with small frames to hold the cards was the forerunner to the photo album. Then, in 1883, George Eastman invented roll film, which together with the Kodak camera in 1888, put family photography within the reach of a wider public. The amateur thus became one of the steadfast pracd-tioners of family photography. While the studio photographer was involved only on special occasions, the amateur recorded the little events that make up the fabric of everyday family life. Traditionally it was the man of the family who took on the role of keeper of its collective memory, while it was primarily women who put together the albums as part of their home-making activities. Both studio and family photographs are a form of social celebration: they record the stages at which new members are integrated into the family - through marriage or birth - and reinforce the sense of belonging to the group. Whether artist or photojournalist, the professional photographer, free from any obligation to celebrate the family, wimesses other aspects. His vision may be humorous, capturing a comical detail; it may be emotional, or a cool record of poverty, but it will inevitably view its subjects with a certain detachment. During the 1930s the underprivileged family became a central theme in documentary photography. In the United States it featured prominently in the programme of the Farm Security Administration, and left to posterity two powerful images of the Great Depression: in 1936, Walker Evans photographed white sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama, and Dorothea Lange's work on the exodus of rural families from the South included the emblematic image of the Migrant Mother. The lives of poor black families in Chicago are recorded in Russell Lee's work of I94r, a tradition of documentary photography that continues in Bruce Davidson's 1967 images of families living on Manhattan's East looth Street. These records of hardship may be contrasted with the French photographer Robert Doisneau's playful pictures from the r94os and 50s of ordinary people and their weddings. Family photography found its broadest expression when it was applied to humanity as a whole, in Edward Steichen's project, The Family of Man'. In 1955, Steichen assembled 503 photographs from 68 countries in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Arranged by theme, from birth to death, they trace significant moments in family life. All are in black and white and the majority were taken out of doors - only one in ten is an interior shot. Some are by leading photographers of the day, others by unknowns. They are infused with an epic spirit, and the exhibition's success reflects the resurgent faith in the human race in the wake of World War II. This universalist project, far removed from a personal encounter between the photographer and his closest relatives, was, however, naive in its apparent belief that all families, in every country, are the same. The register that informs this book is that of photographers who find their subjects in their immediate family circles. Photography of one's kith and kin has become an established genre, whether it attempts to tell a story, to describe a personal bond, or is an aesthetic project that forms part of a larger body of work. By photographing his family, the artist turns his back on remote, public subjects in order to investigate kinship. He makes the most common of projects - the consecration of the family - his own. In doing so, he risks discarding an aesthetic appropriate to the professional photographer and his work may be assimilated to some degree with the practice of the amateur. He observes the people with whom he lives on a daily