Doing Family Photography

The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment

Gillian Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317148654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Family photography, a ubiquitous domestic tradition in the developed world, is now more popular than ever thanks to the development of digital photography. Once uploaded to PCs and other gadgets, photographs may be stored, deleted, put in albums, sent to relatives and friends, retouched, or put on display. Moreover, in recent years family photographs are more frequently appearing in public media: on posters, in newspapers and on the Internet, particularly in the wake of disasters like 9/11, and in cases of missing children. Here, case study material drawn from the UK offers a deeper understanding of both domestic family photographs and their public display. Recent work in material culture studies, geography, and anthropology is used to approach photographs as objects embedded in social practices, which produce specific social positions, relations and effects. Also explored are the complex economies of gifting and exchange amongst families, and the rich geographies of domestic and public spaces into which family photography offers an insight.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315577890-1

I can’t remember when it was, exactly, but I do remember sitting at the kitchen table one autumn evening, with a half-full photograph album open in front of me, and next to it, a big pile of photos, a pair of scissors, a pen and a pack of those annoying sticky photo corners. I had become a mum about six months before and, like very many new mothers, I was both exhausted and taking the time to make a photograph album of our baby. I looked up from selecting photos and inventing captions to see my partner absorbed in something else entirely, and it struck me: why was I spending my time doing this? Why were the photos of our new baby so important to me? Shouldn’t I be sleeping, or ironing baby clothes, or reading a novel or something? And why was it always me that found the time to organise our family photos? We both took photos, after all; why didn’t my partner want to stick them in the album occasionally? And I found, talking to other mothers, that I wasn’t alone in being the one who ended up doing various things with family snaps: getting them developed, sorting them out, making albums, putting them in frames, sending them to other family members, making sure they were stored safely.

Some time later, I decided to find out more about why photos were so important to so many mothers. So I started to interview women with young children about their family photographs. I visited other mums in their houses, and over cups of tea and biscuits we talked about family snaps. We looked at albums and sorted through boxes of photos, and we almost always walked around their house looking at photographs in every room. We talked about taking photographs and getting them printed; we discussed the merits of different sorts of frames and albums; we discussed why some photos were out on display and others weren’t; we talked about who got sent which photographs and why. Then, in a move that is central to the broader argument of this book about photography, I found myself starting to think about family photography not simply as a collection of images, or as a textual archive, or as an ideology, as so many critics have done, but rather as something that people do: that is, as a social practice.

Not long after I’d started interviewing mothers about their family snaps, similar sorts of photographs started to make quite other sorts of appearances: not in houses, this time, but in a range of public spaces. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, for example, family photos became part of posters of those missing. Stuck on subway walls and bus shelters, they pleaded for anyone who’d seen that person to phone their family. Family snaps of some of the people missing after the tsunami that devastated large areas around the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004 also went public, particularly photos of European tourists and their children; some of these were circulated on the Internet. In the UK meanwhile, the press repeatedly used family snaps of children who had been abducted: for example, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman who were murdered in 2002, and Madeleine McCann who went missing in 2007 (a UK businessman paid for 20,000 posters with a photo of Madeline and distributed them to lorry drivers in an effort to locate her; the Pope blessed a photograph of her). Immediately after the bombs in London on 7 July 2005, again many family photos of missing people were turned into posters by anxious friends and relatives. Photographs of these posters were printed in newspapers, and British newspapers carried many photographs of those feared dead, reprinting the same photos as the names of the victims were confirmed. Once a person was confirmed as dead, some of the photos appeared once more, in temporary memorials, stuck onto a wall and lit by a candle, or held in place by the arms of a teddy bear or the petals of a bundle of flowers. This book is about family photographs in their domestic settings, and also about what happens when they go public in such circumstances.

*

Family photography is a hugely popular pastime. In the global north, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t possess at least a few snaps of some family members, and with the popularity of digital cameras hooked up to home computers it would be possible to find some people with thousands. In the UK alone in 2005, an estimated 39 million rolls of film were processed, 20 million disposable cameras used and 2.8 billion digital images taken (PMA 2006, 106). Over half of UK households now own a digital camera, and about the same proportion have a camera phone (Munir 2005; PMA 2006, 19). Yet there is remarkably little interest in this extensive image-making and image-sharing among the large number of academic critics now writing about contemporary visual culture. Most of that work focuses on images made by professionals: films and photographs, whether screened in cinemas or by televisions, hung up in art galleries or used as advertising, as part of newspaper reporting or on various kinds of websites. The little work that has been done on contemporary family photography is generally rather dismissive of it, although there are exceptions to this (for example Batchen 2008; Chalfen 1987; Halle 1993; Larsen 2008). The ordinary photographs that I and, most likely you take and keep and display and send are just not seen as important enough to warrant sustained and generous critical scrutiny.

So part of this book – Chapters 3, 4 and 5 – looks in some detail at family photography in the UK now. It explores the rich and reflexive range of things that people think, do and feel with their photos, and suggests some reasons for just why they are so popular and so significant to so many people. The description of family photography offered here is partial, though. It is based on two sets of interviews with women living in two towns in south-east England, all of whom had young children, and most of whom were either at home with their children full-time, or working part-time, when I talked with them in their homes. The first set I did in 2000, when all my interviewees had film cameras and only one had a home computer. The second set of interviews were carried out between 2006 and 2008, when everyone I spoke to had a home computer, most had digital cameras, and all had sent photographs to family members on the Internet. In all, I spoke to 28 women. Most were white and British; I also interviewed six members of an Israeli friendship network; other interviewees were from Pakistan and the USA. All were middle-class, in terms of their cultural capital, and all, for the most part, did a remarkably similar range of things with their photographs. I learnt that, for this particular group of women, family snaps were a very important part of their roles as mothers. And not only as mothers: also as daughters, daughters-in-law, aunts, nieces and friends. Indeed, family snaps were central to the maintenance of family togetherness, and often of friendships networks as well. Chapters 4 and 5 describe just how this works.

There were also some significant differences in what these women did with their photos, particularly around some of the things that digital technologies enabled. My interviewees with digital cameras were divided, for example, over whether they deleted lots of their photographs, or kept very nearly all of them; and whether they printed a lot of their digital pictures or hardly any. Getting involved in emailing photos of their kids to friends was also something that some of my interviewees did with enthusiasm and others did only very rarely. So, while I argue that most of what goes on with family snaps is common practice and has certain very important effects in terms of family and friendship relations, there are also significant differences in what the women I spoke with do with their photos. These differences alerted me to the quite specific ways in which these women had assembled a particular range of technologies, and were doing only certain things with them. Some were highly competent computer users, for example, while others could barely find the folders where the photos were stored. Very few used photo-editing software, and even fewer talked about their camera phones.

Rather than review all the digital technologies associated with digital photography, therefore, this book chooses to explore in depth the particular ways in which my interviewees pursue their family photography. It is not therefore a review of every aspect of family photos and digital technologies. It doesn’t say much about photo-sharing websites (Murray 2008; Pauwels 2008), camera phones (van Dijck 2008) or photo-editing software, and there’s nothing about blogs (Cohen 2005): this reflects the activities of my interviewees. Instead, the book focuses in some detail on what a group of middle-class mums with young children do with their family photographs. This selective focus is driven in part by the theoretical bases of this book, which are elaborated in Chapters 2, 5 and 6. There, I theorise family photography as a practice, rather than as a specific kind of image, by drawing on the work of a number of anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Elizabeth Edwards, Daniel Miller, Christopher Pinney and Deborah Poole. These authors all suggest that thinking about photographs as visual objects embedded in practices demands careful empirical research, watching what particular people do with those objects and exploring the consquences of those doings. This sort of research tends to be intensive, close up and detailed. What it lacks in extensive coverage, it makes up for in its fine-grained analytical understanding. The next four chapters interweave both that conceptual analysis and a sustained discussion of my interviewees’ photographic practices.

Some of this book, then, is about what a specific group of women do with their family snaps, and what happens in that doing. The book also pays sustained attention to what happens when such snaps move out of their domestic and familial contexts, and become public images. Indeed, these are the first two of the book’s three questions. What does family photography do? And what happens when its images enter the public sphere?

The mobility of family snaps is not new. Family photographs have always travelled between family members. As many historians of photography have noted, photographs have been made to travel ever since the technology began to develop in England and France in the 1830s (Osborne 2000; Sontag 1979), and a large part of what the women I spoke with do with their family snaps is to send them to distant family and friends; family photos cross oceans and continents, tucked in letters, framed as Christmas cards, attached to emails and, occasionally, up- and downloaded on photo-sharing websites. Increasingly, though, they are also leaving these domestic circulations and entering more public arenas. Again, some family snaps have long been visible in more public places. Framed photographs sit on many an office desk; in the United States, sending a family snap as a Christmas card is a long-established commonplace; in several European countries, it is taken for granted that a family photograph will embellish a gravestone. In the UK, though, such practices have been less popular until recently. However, in the past few years it seems that in the UK too, family snaps are entering public spaces of display more and more often. Once mostly restricted to being looked at only by the family and friends of the people pictured, family snaps are now visible more and more often to the gaze of strangers. In the UK, they are starting to appear on gravestones; they are uploaded onto websites that anyone can access by Googling; they get printed onto shopping bags and t-shirts; they are turned into backgrounds and screensavers on work computers; they are published frequently in the mass media. Chapter 5 begins to theorise this mobility of images by developing Deborah Poole’s (1997) notion of the ‘visual economy’. The visual economy in Poole’s work refers to the circulation of images as commodities in the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 elaborates this notion of the visual economy to provide a way of understanding the key aspects of photographs’ contemporary mobility between various places and media of display.

In exploring the mobility of photographs between different sites of display, this book pays most attention to the appearance of family snaps in the mass media. Again though, I have chosen to work with a specific example to explore the mobility of photographs in detail, as part of ‘minor histories that adress themselves to the “big” questions of globalisations in a careful and limited manner’ (Collier and Ong 2005, 15). The example is the photographs of the missing and the dead printed in a dozen mass-circulation British newspapers after the bomb explosions in London in July 2005.

The photographs of the missing and the dead after the bombs in London in July 2005 are a significant example of the contemporary mobility of family snaps. Once in the public sphere of the UK mass media, they circulated extensively, not just in the UK but globally. They were seen in and from many parts of the world, in British newspapers, in newspapers published in other countries, on newspaper websites and the BBC’s website, on television screens and in news magazines. However, critical discussions of the global and the visual have paid very little attention to family snaps, whether travelling between family members or caught up in the circulations of the mass media. Instead, the main focus has been on images produced by professionals. Arjun Appadurai (1996, 35), for example, in elaborating his notion of globalising ‘mediascapes’, describes its constituents as ‘newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film production studios’. Other critics have repeated this emphasis, paying attention to the newspapers, television channels, satellites, software, image banks and websites that control what Toby Miller (1998, 49) calls ‘the extraordinary imbalance in [global] textual trade’. A much smaller body of work, meanwhile, has called attention to the importance of visual images and objects to the negotiation of identity by global migrants (see for example Axel 2008; Paerregaard 2008; Shankar 2006; Skrbis 1998).

In all of this discussion about contemporary images making the world global, then, there is little on family photography. Yet the ‘global’ does not have an innate content. Its particular geography at any one moment is an effect of many different kinds of things and processes reaching across long distances, and pulling distant places into certain kinds of relations with one another. As we will see in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this book, family snaps travelling do indeed make a certain sort of global space, connecting distant family members with each other in various ways.

Why than has so little critical attention been paid to family snaps? To explain the neglect of family snaps in accounts of contemporary, globalising visual culture, it is necessary, I think, to make the feminist point that things associated with the domestic are often simply not seen as important enough to be worthy of critical attention. The work of Griselda Pollock (1999), for example, among many others, has shown that the association of women with the domestic is a major cause of their exclusion from making ‘art’ objects; ‘art’ is not made in homes, it is made in studios where lone geniuses can rely on someone else to do the cooking, washing and parenting. Similarly, an important essay by Richard Nagar, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell and Susan Hanson (20...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 How to Look at Family Photographs: Practices, Objects, Subjects and Places
• 3 What is Done with Family Snaps?
• 4 What Happens with this Doing? Family, Domestic Space and Mothering
• 5 The Circulation of Family Photographs in the Visual Economy
• 6 Family Photos Going Public
• 7 The Politics of Sentiment: Picturing the Missing and the Dead in London, July 2005
• 8 Looking Again, Ethically, at Family Snaps in the Mass Media
• 9 Conclusions: Family Photographs, Domestic and Public, and the Contemporary Visual Economy
• Bibliography
• Index