the truth behind family albums?

[hannah_boardman]

is the family album a true representation o the famiy?

[Matt Laur]

No. Like any media, it bears the mark of the person who records, edits, and presents it. There's scarcely a topic that needs and receives more editing than one's perception and recollection and wishful thinking about family... so, no.

[jtk]

In editing, scanning, and distributing the initial edition of prints (one or two more editions to follow) to son, sister, nieces, I discovered a lot about previous generations...they came alive...

 

...editing entailed close observation ("who IS that and where?" "what's going on?") and chronological sequencing of the lot...hundreds of prints and negatives going back into the late 1800s...

 

I found images of my grandfather and grandmother during their courtship, accompanied by my grandmother's spinster sisters...my grandfather with his 1914 (?) motorcycle club, my mother and her sister looking angry with each other, and plenty of evidence of what attracted my mother and father to each other...

[randall ellis]

Truth is as subjective as reality. Everyone, even those who experience the same thing at the same time, will have somewhat different interpretations of any given event, and time can alter those differences even further depending on life experiences.

 

A family album is just what it is, a group of single captured moments that have a different context for every viewer. If we have the benefit of being able to speak with those in the pictures, we gain some insight into that one person's interpretations of that moment. Talk to two different people about an old photograph and you will almost certainly get two different views...

 

- R

[bill_clark___minnetonka_mi]

The idea of "family" has changed with many ideas as to what constitutes family today. I

find many desire what I would call the "traditional" family but haven't either found it or

have lost it.

 

My photography & the albums I create focuses on the "traditional" family; however, I find I

have to remember some do not have that and I need to create images which best

represent their situations in life.

 

Could it be is why I see many photographers focus on the two main characters of an event

and then create many images of things?

 

With my photography I work at creating images of happy people, making them look more

beautiful than they think they are. Aren't we all beautiful in different ways?

 

Find the good in people & capture those moments.

[jtk]

Find whatever you find. If you have a lot of photos, look closely. There may be stories in them that aren't attractive: share those stories. If ancestors look like saints, that makes folks in the future

feel like bums.

 

Good story-telling that resonates with the remembered stories of others in your family is more honest than "truth," which is usually an excuse for bias.

 

If you can't write adequately, you can't tell a good story: collaborate with somebody. The best photojournalists seem to be reasonably good writers.

 

Some of us are the eldest survivor in the family (I am), and have listened to tales and gossip of previous generations....we're bearers of the family story. A valid story's the key:"valid" means others will find the story believable based upon what they know. Do your best.

 

This becomes the family story, going forward, but it's just a bunch of useless snapshots unless we include commentary about the subjects...stories about the individuals shown, even if only "he was his mother's favorite kid but died on skid row"

[steve_swinehart]

Don't have a family album...so, I'm at a bit of a loss as to what you're attempting to get at.

 

My question back is - what's your definition of a "true representation"? What does that mean? Something beyond the images themselves?

 

The few family albums I've seen generally seem to consist of scenes like family picnics, Chistmas photos, birthday events, etc. They really seem like personal event documentation so you can relive the past.

 

Is there something more you're after...?

[jtk]

Steve, in addition to using the meaningless word "true," Hannah said "representation."

 

"Representation" means more than snapshots or portraits: IMO individual images can't rise much above that.

 

If they could we wouldn't want multiple images in modern biographies. Norman Mailer just died: one photo doesn't do the job, except for those of us who followed his career, and no collection

would do anything for anybody without written narrative. IMO.

 

Photography is a lite medium, without words, for big stories.

[matt_needham]

No, my family members are much taller and exist in three dimensions.

[will_perlis]

It depends on the definition of "true". I just saw some pictures of my grandmother as a 'teen in the early 1900's, some when she was middle-aged, and some when she was ninety-four (she made it to 102).

 

They're all true and all quite different. The same holds for the pictures of my parents and my kids, etc.

[jtk]

Will, if you gave those photos to grandkids without explanation, would

they know the "truth" about that woman, or would they just see pictures of a woman, represented to be their ancestor?

 

Your smallest recollections of that woman, or tales your parents told about her are as valuable as the photos, adding validity ("on of ten kids, lived in Memphis, had three kids, one died in WWII, I'm her grandson, she baked great cookies" is a great epitaph)

[will_perlis]

John,

 

I'm annotating them as I scan them and then again later as I remember things about them.

 

That said, even without words, there's something poignant about seeing "Grandma" as a vivacious young woman flirting with her husband before WW1, seeing her worn but still vigorous at fifty-something, and then frail and failing in her nineties.

[jtk]

Will, absolutely. I have my grandmother as a toddler, and I have her holding my infant son 37 years ago, when she was in her late 80s, and I have her in between, in a black woolen bathing outfit with my muscular, asthmatic, scrawney grandfather and her two watchful sisters (both beauties, I knew one of them in her advanced age, also in woolen bathing suits)...and I know exactly where the beach is, in Monterey CA. Poignance is cheap, of course, but I love it too.

[petemillis]

The family album is definitely NOT a true representation of the family. They present a view that is almost entirely skewed in the direction of the "good times" - those holidays, picnics, special events, days out, new births, weddings and so on. The family album virtually always has no representation of the bad times - how often are there pictures of kids being bawled at by parents, of kids beating each other up, of parents arguing, of kids being irritating, and all those other delightful aspects of family life?

[will_perlis]

Pete,

 

It's not just the albums that are biased; you need to be suspicious of memories and verbal or written reports of family doings, good or bad, too. They're all very mutable, as a very recent family contretemps has brought home to me again. Rashomon wasn't just an exercise in exotic film-making.

 

Biased or not though, there's truth in those pictures. It's just not the complete truth and never can be.

[don_e]

Re: "good times"

 

I could show counter-examples. Family photos are revealing in ways the subjects or the photographers did not consider. And sometimes folks don't know how really bad their times were.

 

I grew up in a family where photos were not only taken posed or at events. There was unconscious documentary dna in my family's photography.

[bobtodrick]

I find the family album fascinating. It can be so many different things...depending on how truthful the photographer wants to be (check out 'The Lines of my Hand' by Robert Frank...anything but a feel-good representation of his family.

 

A 'real' photographer (meaning someone who really wants to record their family history...not just the birthday parties, etc) will include the bad with the good. My own 'family album' contains scenes from a deathbed, the effect the death of a loved one has, and the emotions of divorce. Not everyone just shoots the 'happy snaps'.

 

The family album is important because it is our future history. Much of what we know about the way people lived in the past is from what they wrote...the journals of people like Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Proust...all were skewed, skewed, showing their points of view...but together they tell us how people lived.

 

Few keep journals these days...it's far easier to record the moment with a photograph than sit down with pen and paper and keep a journal or diary. In 200 years from now historians will study our family photo albums with us much ardour as those do today when they find a rare manuscript.

[Norma Desmond]

Pete--

 

Check out Annie Leibovitz's latest book, A Photographer's Life.

 

There you will find an alternative to what you think is the skewed direction of family photos,

including dead bodies, hospital beds, caskets, and graves.

[fate_faith_change_chains]

The question reminds me of Roland Barthes' <a href="http://elsa.photo.net/

barthes.htm">Camera Lucida</a> and the photograph of his mother as a child and how

he views it in his minds eye. Another <a href="http://www.momotom.net/random/2006/

07/roland-barthes-camera-lucida_05.html">link</a>.

And for a more bizarre and fascinating surrealistic approach of the family album and the

'truthfullness' of it check out Ralph Eugene Meatyards <a href="http://www.artnet.com/

Galleries/Exhibitions.asp?gid=396&cid=18142&source=2&type=2"> ' The Family Album

of

Lucybelle Crater' .

[jtk]

I don't think "truth" is relevant here, or anywhere save a courtroom. The use of the word demonstrates delusion (unawareness of the veil of maya, to the mystics among us) more than honesty.

 

"Purpose" and "validity" are IMO the key words.

 

Purpose is clear enough: What do you, the producer, intend. It's a matter of taking responsibility and enacting what you really intended. Did you succeed or not?

 

Validity, by definition, requires cross-referencing. Somebody else has to agree with you, to be valid.

 

That Leibowitz followed in the footsteps of Avedon and others (going back to before the Civil War) recording death does not mean she's especially honest. Records of corpses were one of the very first commercial utilities of photography...it was cheaper than hiring a traveling painter to bring the dead back.

 

Family isn't vanishing or changing significantly. Are you committed to someone or some group? Are they? Do you or they have ancestors?

 

If a Navajo person (I think about Navajos because I've known a few for a while) can't learn the ancestry of another Navajo person, that person is taboo. Certainly sex with that person would be polluting, damning. The first thing a young person does, on meeting another, is inquire about ancestry in order to learn the structure of the game. What clan is your mother? Your father, their parents?

 

I'm a white guy, but I'm beginning to be aware of my own Navajo-sort- of- response...I'm reassured when another person seems to know his origins...Navajo wonder, when there's no answer to family questions, if the being they're meeting is as human as she or he appears...

[smedly64]

My daughter and I are at the different ends of the album issue. She creates albums where the photo is only one part of the production, as she adds colorful borders, journal entrys and grafiti to creat a page that tells a story.

For me I create nothing but a picture, as I dislike poseing, there are no traditional family shots. just people places and things as they happened.

[GerrySiegel]

An ambiguous question. When I look at old pictures they spark memories and anecdotes. My first car. My wife in bed at the Bainbridge Naval Hospial, MD with our first child. Me,with lots of hair:-). I spent perhaps too much time lining up the shot,and stopping the car, versus living in the moment. Yet,for those around me, my box of slides from 30 odd years ago are still fresh and exciting. Most especially those in Kodachrome and in stereo mounts. Yes, I am about to be a great grandfather and the grandkid hasn't caught the habit of recording events. Maybe the blog suffices. But that is just words. I have a 1922 black and white print of my parents. But the album she had got lost in a move. I realize how much it is a loss just now.

 

I am able to piece together some family history,incidentally, from the genealogy sites,where they recently published on line the 1917 draft registrations, my father's signature was fun to see,his height,his employer. Clues abound and the mystery is part of the fun is what I am suggesting. Fiction can somehow be more real than real, more true,said Mailer on Fresh Air interview aired from the archives yesterday... Maybe the album is how we would like to remember them and us, and a projection of the past. Without the full truth of boring times. Sort of like skipping through the commercials on a DVR. My three cents,inflation adjusted. gs

[jtk]

George, good points...except that blogs are momentary, pissed away, and as in a recent post here, bloviation.

 

What's important is the written paper and the photo prints. If people have to turn to technology to obtain family information, most won't. Ever.

 

I agree fully about mystery and Mailer and fiction. Mailer wrote longhand, knew enough to postulate a god without pretending to fully "believe," and was smart enough to realize that it made more sense to postulate multiple deities, like multiple muses. He did however believe fully in absolute, abstract evil. And he didn't die senile, at 84.

[keith_lubow]

No; it's a book of pictures for the family's enjoyment.

 

Keith

[GerrySiegel]

If the house is,heaven forbid, on fire, the first thing is " Grab the album."

One thing we can thank the digital era for is the ability to backup our memories in some archival space.

 

The family album needs to be supplemented with words and notes. I was able to capture my late aunt Sonia and my mother Rose( Rose was born 1899) in a cassette interview I made as a lark. I am not sure what "truth" there is in those recollections,either, but Sonia would coach and correct Rose on details, and the result was fascinating and kind of funny too..gs