Abstract: Family photography is one of the most common genres of photography, yet few scholars have studied it. Careful historical research, detailed and comprehensive social observation, and insightful criticism are indispensable to an accurate understanding of family photography in its different contexts. The ethnographic turn in art historical research offers perspectives and methods for studying family photography. Family photography enables us to find, outside mainstream discourse, another way of writing and looking back on history, and through ethnography we can see the agency and diversity of family photography in this process.
Keywords: family photography; snapshots; art photography; ethnographic turn; anthropology of art
Introduction
Family photography is one of the most common genres of photography. The composition, focus, and lighting of photographs in a family album are not necessarily correct, but because the places where the people in the pictures stand and the clothes they wear always evoke the viewer's memories of and feelings about the past, these technical elements tend to recede into the background. A corner of the photograph often bears the date it was taken, reminding the person looking at it how quickly the years have flown. Viewers may even find, on the back of the photograph, notes written by the person who took it: some describe the scene and the people in the photo, others record what the writer felt at the time. In addition, viewers can find in family albums photographs of themselves, their families, and their friends taken by professional photographers. The people in these photographs stand or sit before a plain backdrop or a painted cloth depicting a landscape, a landmark, or some particular scene.
A generation that has grown up alongside the development of digital media may never have the experience of leafing through a photo album or going to a photo studio to have their picture taken. Yet those who have studied photography and photographs never seem able to escape the gaze of family photography. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's description of the Winter Garden photograph, a family picture that runs through the entire second part of the book[1]63-119, not only expresses his mourning for his late mother but also serves as a point of departure for his discussion of "photography's peculiar interpretation of time—through a single image, photography, as if by sleight of hand, links past, present, and future all at once."[2]13 In contrast to the delicate and sensitive Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, in a social survey of the French public conducted in the 1950s, collected data showing that the camera had already become a very popular household item in France at the time. The first chapter of his book Photography: A Middle-brow Art opens with this question: "How and why did photographic practice spread so easily and so widely that there are now few households in towns without a camera?"[3]13 According to Bourdieu's observations, photography was never absent from a child's first communion① or from people's weddings and honeymoons②, and so family photographs were never absent either.
In fact, when we step outside the framework of the so-called "canonical history of photography" and look back on and re-examine photography as a technology, an art, and a medium, we find that no matter the period, no matter how the equipment changed, and no matter how the presentation of photographs shifted, we can always easily find images of the family, the most basic form of organization in human society. From the family portraits of dignitaries and nobles in the past to the casual snapshots shared on social media platforms in the digital age③, the social functions, modes of circulation, cultural meanings, and historical contexts of family photographs have been constantly changing. These changes have made family photography a complex medium that is "significantly exorbitant," overloaded with meaning. It is hard to imagine that the state of mind of King Kamehameha III of the Kingdom of Hawaii and his family (Figure 1), dressed in Western clothing and facing the camera in 1853[4]25, would be the same as that of parents who photograph their child with a smartphone and immediately share it on social media. And when contemporary artists select, edit, and collage their own family images or ones they have collected, giving them new meanings, is their understanding and experience of these images anything like Barthes's, full of nostalgic reverie and reflections on life and death?
Clearly, careful historical research, detailed and comprehensive social observation, and insightful criticism are indispensable to an accurate understanding of family photography in its different contexts, and an interdisciplinary research method is called for. In my view, such a method should integrate existing theories from the history of photography, social history, anthropology, and art studies. In the discussion that follows, this article will attempt to construct such a research framework in order to advance theoretical discussion of family photography.
I. Defining Family Photography
Although the importance of family photography to people is self-evident, and although it is an everyday thing, it is difficult to define, for two reasons.
First, definition implies classification, and Barthes regarded photography itself as unclassifiable, even though in practice people often, for convenience, divide it into three broad categories: empirical (professional or amateur), rhetorical (landscapes, still lifes, portraits, nudes), and aesthetic (realism, pictorialism). Barthes had already recognized that these classifications apply equally to other, more traditional forms of visual representation, and so they are of limited significance.[1]4 Even if we grant that these categories are helpful for analyzing and evaluating photographs, family photography, being widely distributed across them, ends up with blurred boundaries. For example, to take a respectable "family portrait" or an ID photo with special requirements, people often turn to professional photographers; on trips, family members take turns being the photographer. Likewise, family albums are indeed dominated by pictures of people, but on special occasions (such as weddings, travel, and funerals), our cameras are also inevitably pointed at certain objects or scenes endowed with rich meanings. As for the aesthetic significance of these photographs, no generalization is possible. Family photography, then, is not necessarily professional, nor necessarily amateur; its subjects are indeterminate, and the aesthetic characteristics of its images vary with the people or things photographed. It is therefore very hard to assign it to any one category.
Second, family photography is often confused with photography about the family. Although the two are related, they differ significantly in nature. In Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China, Hung Wu discusses in detail how portraits taken in the studio of Milton Miller, an American photographer active in Hong Kong and Guangzhou in the mid-nineteenth century, were "defined" and "redefined" as historians of photography continued to unearth and study them. Hung Wu's discussion involves two sets of images totaling eleven photographs.[5]18-30 Without any clarification, we might easily assume that these two sets are, respectively, individual portraits of two Qing officials, portraits of their wives, photographs of them with their wives, and family portraits taken by a professional photographer in a studio. After close observation, however, Hung Wu questions whether these photographs truly reflect the identities of the sitters. On the one hand, the clothing in the two sets overlaps considerably, as if a few outfits had simply been put on different people, and one woman's combination of garments does not even conform to the dress customs of the time. On the other hand, the identical furniture and interior décor in both sets indicate that they were produced in the same place, very likely Miller's studio in Guangzhou.[5]22-29 Hung Wu therefore questions the "historical nature" of these photographs, arguing that they cannot prove the true identities of the sitters and possess only a "fictional documentary quality."[5]30
Although Hung Wu's discussion does not directly address family photography, if the people in these photographs possess only a "fictional documentary quality" and their identities are hard to confirm, can we still call them family photographs? Are the people in the photos "actors" hired by Miller to construct a "Chinese" stereotype[5]18-30, or, like the Indians in Christopher Pinney's account, did they hope to become better versions of themselves in the studio, that "chamber of dreams," and make the moment eternal?[6]108,179-180 Unfortunately, we cannot know the truth, and so these images, presumed at first glance to be family photographs, can only provisionally be defined as images about the family. In fact, one important difference between family photography and photography about the family lies in whether the people or events recorded in the photograph possess the opposite of a "fictional documentary quality," that is, a so-called "genuine documentary quality." For outsiders, judging whether a family photograph has this quality raises a very practical problem: one needs to understand what Elizabeth Edwards calls the photograph's "social biography," that is, the original context in which the photograph was produced and the changes it underwent as social and historical contexts shifted.[7]13 In other words, if information about when a photograph was taken, by whom, and for what purpose is missing, it will be very difficult to judge whether it can count as family photography at all. Thus, before family photography has empirical, rhetorical, or aesthetic attributes, it is first of all functional. This functionality manifests itself concretely, on the one hand, in the flashbacks of memory and surges of emotion we experience when facing family images; and on the other, in our understanding, as onlookers, of the image's original context and of the changes in its meaning brought about by the passage of time. As Nicole Hudgins put it in her study of nineteenth-century English and French working-class family photography: "Then as now, family photographs did not always evoke happy memories. They might instead call up painful memories of cruelty, jealousy, or even hatred on the part of abused spouses or children."[8]562 In short, only the more we know about a photograph's "social biography" can we extract meaningful and complex information from it, judge the emotional significance it holds for different people, and determine whether it really belongs to family photography.
II. The Debate over the Ethnographic Turn
Grasping a photograph's "social biography" in order to arrive at a more precise definition and interpretation of it echoes, to some extent, what the interpretive and symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz called thick description. In ethnography, such thick description has four characteristics: it is interpretive; what it interprets is the flow of social discourse; it continually tries to rescue the "said" of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms; and it is microscopic.[9]20-21 All four characteristics can be found in our viewing of family images, and the complexity inherent in family photography can be articulated through them. By means of this ethnographic method, the "social biography" and rich meanings of family images can be preserved. We might even say, therefore, that the study of family photography must not only focus on images and their histories but also borrow the perspectives and methods of anthropology.
In his essay "Snapshots: Art History and the Ethnographic Turn," Geoffrey Batchen expresses his endorsement of this approach combining the methods of anthropology, iconography, and history. As an art historian whose primary object of study is photography, he points out that snapshots, including many family images, are an art historian's nightmare. They cannot enter the purview of art history (especially the history of photography) as a discipline because "most snapshots are sentimentally excessive and, as pictures, utterly banal and uninventive, with no market value in either creative or commercial terms."[10]123-124 Ironically, however, this "mundane photography" is popular photography in the truest sense. Any scholar of photography therefore cannot avoid dealing with it.[10]124 This is why Batchen advocates viewing snapshots through a comprehensive lens that places their artistic quality in a secondary position. Like Geertz, Batchen calls this interdisciplinary mode of research interpretation, and places it under visual culture, a field of study more recent than traditional art history. To study these mundane images is "to study the relationship between photography and human life."[10]127
It could be said that, for Batchen, visual culture studies is itself a product of the ethnographic turn in the study of art and photography (including their historiography). Batchen, however, did not coin the term "ethnographic turn." He wrote his essay in order to critique the art historian and critic Hal Foster's essay "The Artist as Ethnographer." For Foster, both the ethnographic turn that appeared in art in the mid-to-late twentieth century and the visual studies that have flourished since the 1980s have many problems at the level of cultural identity.[11]173 He proposed the term "ethnographic turn" to describe a phenomenon in which artists were becoming more and more like ethnographers, and he was deeply concerned about it. Foster argues that the artist as ethnographer, like "the author as producer" that Walter Benjamin called for in the 1930s, sounds radical, as though aiming to break the existing shackles of culture, society, institutions, and ideology in order to create something new, but is in fact built on three assumptions and can only end in confusion about the practitioner's cultural identity. These three assumptions are:
First, the site of political transformation is the site of artistic transformation, and political vanguards locate artistic vanguards and, under certain circumstances, substitute for them; second, this "political-artistic" site is always elsewhere, in the field of the other... this elsewhere, this outside, is the Archimedean point from which the dominant culture is transformed or at least subverted; third, if the artist in question is not perceived as socially and/or culturally other, he or she has only limited access to this transformative alterity, but if he or she is perceived as other, he or she automatically gains this access.[11]173
From the above it can be seen that the "quasi-anthropological art" Foster discusses in his essay is suspected of consuming "political correctness" and deliberately catering to "primitivist fantasy."[11]177 For example, he critically discusses Renée Green's representation of the bodies of two Black women famous in Europe and America in her installation Seen (Figure 2). In this work, the artist uses the singing voice and dance moves of the "Black Pearl" Josephine Baker④, along with nude pictures of the "Hottentot Venus" Sarah Baartman⑤ seen through a peephole, to lure viewers into looking at these two Black female bodies. Yet once viewers, drawn by these exotic and erotically tinged images, step into the space the artist has designed in advance, they find themselves under a spotlight, their shadows projected onto a screen and exposed to the gaze of a pair of eyes made by the artist. The viewers thus become the objects of looking.
Seen is like a combination of the myth of the Siren⑥ and The Truman Show⑦. The artist uses Black female bodies to attract people to look, and in the end turns the lookers into the looked-at. This reversal of roles is a metaphor for the original sin of vision: we are always drawn to things that are novel, erotic, or merely pleasing to the eye, and in the end we ourselves cannot escape the gaze of the other, of society, and of history. From this we can sense the weight of making viewers confront an original sin imposed upon themselves. Until people become aware of this weight, the Black female body remains, as it was hundreds of years ago, an object from which colonizers derive visual pleasure. Foster criticizes works of this kind, arguing that their projections onto the foreign other easily lapse into idealization and incompleteness, merely borrowing the guise of the other for "political asylum" and consuming the objects they represent.[11]179 In the case of Seen, however, Foster does not mention how the artist, by imposing this visual original sin on viewers, prompts them to reflect on the mechanisms of looking and on colonial history; instead, he emphasizes the fact that the images themselves are of African female bodies. If viewing these images can lead viewers to reflect on the power relations within the visual apparatus and the colonial history behind them, can the work still be called a form of consumption? Out of fear that such historical images will be consumed again, must we shelve them or erase them from public view? Clearly, these questions are open to debate. Foster does not discuss the possible effects of the work on its audience, which means his critique is incomplete.
Moreover, Foster's understanding of anthropology and ethnography is also partial. For example, citing the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, he argues that anthropologists have acknowledged that at its founding the discipline presupposed a homogenized space-time, regarding people temporally and spatially distant from themselves as culturally and historically "primitive," so that "to this day the quest for alterity still 'others' the self as it did in the past, while the other is reduced to a foil for the self."[11]178 Although some art projects today do recklessly intervene in communities in the name of fieldwork, using the field as a tool to guarantee the legitimacy of interventionist art, not all artists who draw on anthropological theory and research methods hold this attitude toward the other. In China, for instance, there is no shortage of examples such as the Bishan Project, which combines farmers' livelihood issues with artistic intervention. In addition, regarding anthropology or ethnography merely as disciplines subordinate to the theoretical system of postcolonialism and concerned only with minority and marginal groups is far too narrow. From this partial perspective, Foster's discussion offers little for the question of how the ethnographic turn can aid the study of family photography; instead it reveals a groundless obstinacy about art history as a discipline and about the identity of the artist. As Batchen observes: "Although his discussion covers the art critics and historians who participate in the 'ethnographic turn,' the examples he discusses here are all artists... This emphasis itself betrays the ethnographic foundations of Foster's own art history."[10]128 Founders of the discipline of art history such as Kant, Hegel, Semper, and Riegl all benefited from anthropological research[10]128, as did Aby Warburg. Georges Didi-Huberman has discussed in detail how Warburg's trip to Mexico spurred his thinking about the disciplinary boundaries of art history.[12]61-69
The visual culture scholars on the anthropological side, whom Foster overlooks, have in fact made considerable contributions to explaining the different meanings family photography holds for different groups and to enriching both its intension and its extension.[13] Pinney once proposed: "All photography is part of a world photographic system."[14]141 This represents an effort to bridge disciplinary divides. By contrast, according to Foster's discussion, visual culture poses a certain threat to the existence of art history, and it seems a clear line must be drawn. But if we reject visual culture as an integrative method of research, must we go back to debating the ontological question "What is art?" and let the study of images come to a standstill? And how are we to deal with the ever-increasing number of functional images? Returning to the question of family photography, how should we regard the phenomenon of more and more artists incorporating elements of family imagery into their art projects?
III. Family Photography as Art
In the art world, photography related to the family is considered "vernacular photography" (rendered in Chinese as siyu sheying, "private-speech photography," or ziyu sheying, "self-speech photography")⑧, which refers to the everyday photographic practice of artists already recognized by the art world. Rui Wang argues that the "fine photography" and vernacular photography proposed by Szarkowski are a pair of "specifically designated image concepts of different form and substance," and that it was precisely from the distinction between these two kinds of images that he developed the theoretical notion of "snapshot aesthetics."[15] The "private" in the Chinese term for vernacular photography points to the artist's production and reproduction of images on the basis of personal experience, especially everyday life. Although Batchen does not consider such images to be snapshots, this article holds that vernacular photography, family photography, and snapshots, while subtly different, also overlap. It is worth noting that although family photography has increasingly taken the form of snapshots as photographic equipment has become widespread, the two are not entirely the same concept. Family photography, as a functional form of photography, also includes many "slow shots": they are produced by professional photographers, often as accompaniments to rites of passage (in Arnold van Gennep's term), and hold emotional and mnemonic value for the sitters or the owners of the photographs. In an era when snapshots were still a luxury, or for groups and families who could not afford snapshots, these posed photographs can hardly be characterized simply as "mundane." Nor should we evaluate them simply from an aesthetic or technical standpoint. Then as now, our view of family photographs has not changed much: Bourdieu described the family album as a "tombstone" not because family photography is lifeless, but because, although their images are ordinary, their conception commonplace, and their technique formulaic, they have important symbolic significance, cohesive effects, and mnemonic functions for a family, just as a tombstone sums up a person's life and proves that the person once existed.[3]30-31
It is precisely because family photography serves such functions that artists exploring family relationships and intimacy appropriate these seemingly unartistic photographs into their own art projects. To understand why her grandparents' generation left their hometown on the mainland and moved to Hong Kong, the artist Wei Liu juxtaposed Here, photographs she took while traveling back and forth between Hong Kong and the mainland, with Album, a work formed from fragments cropped from old family albums, in order to trace her ancestors' footsteps and, starting from herself, reflect on the relationship between family and national history. In Album, the cropped image fragments almost never show a person's face. Instead, the artist carefully uses parts of people whose identities are hard to discern, studio backdrops, and even the materials of which the album itself is made (Figure 3). This deliberate de-emphasis of people in favor of the background alters the original hierarchy of primary and secondary elements in family images, turning the secondary into the main subject. These fragments become clues and traces guiding the artist, pointing to the geographical environment and historical background at the time the photographs were taken.
The example of Album shows that family photography is not only a vessel of memory and emotion but can also serve as evidence for tracing a particular history or particular events. In 2019, Yongquan Jin, a longtime editor of photography magazines, compiled the old photographs he had purchased over many years into a book titled Anonymous Photos: Images of Chinese Everyday Life in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (hereafter Anonymous Photos). If Wei Liu's Album highlights the intrinsic entanglement between the small family and the era and the nation by cropping portions of the family album as an object, Anonymous Photos attempts, through the atlas and classification, to discuss how the iconographic features of family photography changed with national narratives and the passing of eras. Yongquan Jin attempts "through the analysis and comparison of a large number of cases, to present the historicized face of ordinary people's everyday photographs," placing these "diasporic images," whose origins cannot be traced and whose destinations cannot be foreseen, within the mutually distinct yet overlapping categories of "performativity, imitation, symbolism, practicality, and inter-imagery."[16]2-3 In my view, whether it is Wei Liu's attention to the family album as a repository of private memory or Yongquan Jin's display and arrangement of pictorial content and themes, their starting point is to use "marginal" family photography to redefine the center, reflect on the mainstream, and negotiate with grand narratives. This largely coincides with the Foucauldian historical-sociological critical stance that Batchen adopts in his critique of the traditions of art historical writing. In another essay analyzing vernacular photography, Batchen writes: "How can photography be restored to its own history? How can we ensure that this history, like the images themselves, has both a material basis and a conceptual expansiveness? Perhaps we should begin by thinking about the photographs that have been excluded from the history of photography."[17]56
Beyond these, there are many art projects without sociological significance that are also closely bound up with family photography, including no small number that document the artist's own family members. For example, the American artist Larry Sultan's Pictures from Home expresses his deep love for his parents and attachment to home by photographing their everyday life in old age and their possessions. As he himself said:
It is hard to say exactly what keeps me going on this project. It has more to do with love than with sociology, and I am more a participant in it than an observer... I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good photographs, what keeps me going on this project, whose meaning I doubt, is... to stop time. I want my parents to live forever.[18]
Sultan's words bring us back to the feelings of Barthes as he described the Winter Garden photograph. It is precisely because family photography concerns those closest to us, and always reminds us of those who have passed away or of time gone by, that we always want to look our best when photographed, and take good care of the photographs once we have them. For Barthes, a photograph could not bring his mother back to life, but it could serve as a passage connecting him to her. For Sultan, whose parents were already advanced in years when he photographed them, these images likewise concern life and death; they are a last-ditch resistance in the face of aging and loss. And even though the family-image works of Wei Liu and Yongquan Jin foreground the sociological function of family photography, the artists' points of departure and arrival never stray from the essential question about the family: "What makes a home?" As Batchen puts it:
The snapshot is often said to be the first thing we would rescue if the house caught fire, yet it is a kind of photograph that is seldom looked at, and almost only ever looked at in the most private and domestic of settings... We must have them (or know that we have them)... Ironically, we take photographs in order to deny the possibility of death, to hold on to time and to ourselves within it. But it is that very photograph that consigns us to an irrefutable past; it becomes itself a lightweight death sentence, a prediction that at some moment in the future we will die. It testifies to the passing of time, and to the inevitability of that passing. Every snapshot, whatever its subject, embodies this contradiction of speaking at once of life and of death.[10]136
Therefore, if we accept Foster's view and draw a so-called sharp line between visual studies and art history, it becomes hard to understand why these artists are able to use family images to dissect family relationships. We might even come to think of family photography as trivial detail of no great consequence, unworthy of theoretical discussion.
Coda: Ritual Vessels, Caves, and Further Possibilities
Finally, I hope to draw out further imagistic dimensions of family photography by discussing two examples, and thereby reveal the transformative energy contained within it. The Chinese artist Xinhao Cheng, who has long created art through ethnographic methods, collected a number of photographs while photographing the Mang people living on the China–Vietnam border (Figure 4). These photographs are wedding pictures of different Mang couples. What is most puzzling about them is the uniform post-production treatment the image-maker applied to the sitters. Not only were they all subjected to the same processing, with facial features exaggerated and overall appearances rendered alike, but these photographs were in fact made by pasting different people's faces onto the same photographic template. The proportions of the bodies in these photographs are unbalanced, and the clothing, backgrounds, and bodily postures are all exactly the same. Why would the Mang, living deep in the mountains, accept this aesthetic and make such photographs a fashion in their wedding customs? Is this a cultural construction of aesthetics, or an expression of their embrace of modernity? Or is it simply because they happened to go to the same photo studio? Although these questions cannot be answered in a few words, what is certain is that they point to the multifaceted nature of family photography across different dimensions. Among other things, for the newly formed Mang couples these photographs represent a reconstruction of family relationships, a confirmation of social designations such as husband and wife. In this respect, they are essentially no different from the wedding photos that urbanites spend huge sums to have taken in European castles. Perhaps, when their owners look at these photographs, what they recall is the wedding itself, or the emotions they felt while sitting upright before the camera in the studio. In any case, these photographs are like indispensable ritual vessels in life's rites of passage, bearing people's memories, emotions, social relationships, and the construction of identity.
The artist Dongdong Cai has long created works using family photographs and images of ordinary people. In the past, he combined these flat photographic images with everyday objects existing in three dimensions to form "photo sculptures," thereby constructing new connections between historical images and reality. His latest work, Life History, however, is a photobook, a thoroughly two-dimensional work. From 600,000 family photographs he had collected, he selected nearly 500 by intuition and, periodizing them by the clothing and settings of the people in them, ultimately fabricated a temporal narrative of three generations of one family from the late Qing to the era of Reform and Opening Up. These narratives cover everything from the ordinary life of outings and excursions to rites of passage such as marriage and childbirth. Although Life History and Anonymous Photos share, to some extent, the same mode of construction, such as searching for, classifying, and rearranging old photographs, the logic behind them differs. Life History appears to have sociological significance, but the images it contains are not repetitive in theme and form as those in Anonymous Photos are—it tells a story, and although the story is fictional, it is built in advance into the collective memory of the Chinese people. It could be said that Anonymous Photos, by grouping individual photographs with similar themes and forms, reinforces the historical consciousness behind these images, whereas Life History rests entirely on the artist's own direct understanding of history and social change. If Anonymous Photos pursues the gaze of a "scientific sociology," Life History is a tender gaze upon relentless social change. Life History opens with a photograph of a cave, its mouth positioned slightly below the center of the frame, emanating pure black without a trace of light. The last two photographs show, respectively, a cave exit filled with bright daylight and a young woman pointing toward the distant sun (Figure 5). This arrangement is clearly the artist's use of Plato's allegory of the cave to convey a thought to the reader: the nameless people in these diasporic images will eventually walk out of the dark cave, turn their backs on their shadows, and embrace the light; each of us ordinary people is one of them, creating history in the course of living.
The metaphor of the ritual vessel stands for imagining individuals' unique experiences from the mundane, repetitive images of family photography, while the metaphor of the cave points to the attempts of artists of our time to awaken collective memory through the typical period schemata of family photography. Family photography enables us to find, outside mainstream discourse, another way of writing and looking back on history, and through ethnography we can see the agency and diversity of family photography in this process. This agency and diversity allow the margins to speak and be seen, and also prompt the center, or the mainstream, to reflect on existing norms and boundaries. Didi-Huberman's notion of being "before the image" emphasizes that we need to confront each image itself, which of course includes those diasporic, anonymous, abandoned "poor images."[20] He uses the figure of the "exorcist" to describe the authorities of Renaissance art history represented by Panofsky, criticizing their practice of likening certain works that did not suit their research interests to a "dybbuk," an evil spirit, and expelling them from art history. As Didi-Huberman argues, with the "end" of this kind of art history, we should long since have stopped being infatuated with masterpieces defined by authorities and haloed with a mystical aura. Instead, "we must have the courage, within such a history, to face both sides, both kinds of 'image': the image of the exorcist and that of the dybbuk he casts out."[21]xv-xxvi In this way we return to Walter Benjamin's grand aspiration of using photography to realize a proletarian vision, and what is most fascinating here is that we seem to have found in family photography a force capable of prying open social change—and it is precisely the product of the practice of each and every one of us. Through it, we rethink history and imagine the future.
Family Photography: History, Art, and Anthropology
Abstract: Family photography is one of the most common types of photography, but few scholars have studied it so far. Prudent historical evidence, meticulous and comprehensive social observation, and creative criticism are indispensable to our accurate understanding of family photography in its different contexts. The ethnographic turn in art historical research provides perspectives and methods for the study of family photography. Family photography enables us to find another possibility of writing and revisiting history outside mainstream discourses, thus enabling us to see the dynamism and diversity of family photography through ethnography.
Keywords: Family photography, Snapshots, Art photography, Ethnographic turn, Art anthropology
Notes
① First communion is a rite of passage popular in the Latin Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Anglican Church. The ceremony celebrates a child's first reception of the Eucharist.
② Bourdieu's description of photographic practice on these family occasions in the first chapter of Photography was originally intended to discuss photography's "distinction" of social relations (groups at different economic levels differ in their consumption of photographic equipment, and the occasions they can photograph also differ) and its "integration" of them (the motive for taking photographs lies in confirming social relations and making them more solid). At the same time, these examples all come from ordinary people's family photography, indirectly demonstrating its ubiquity. Pierre Bourdieu, et al. Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Shaun Whiteside, trans., Polity Press, 1990, p16-22.
③ The exact date on which photography entered the digital age is difficult to determine. A bestselling author named Lucy Gower wrote a short piece analyzing Kodak's business decisions, "What has the story of Kodak's demise got to do with the Third Sector?", which cites a graph from the market research website Ignition Framework showing sales trends for film cameras, film, and digital cameras from 1995 to 2011. From around 2000, sales of film cameras and film began to decline. By around 2003–2004, digital camera sales began to exceed those of film products. Unfortunately, the chart offers only a trend for reference; the original author does not state the data source or indicate which country or region the statistics are based on, and it therefore lacks rigor. For Gower's article, see: Lucy Gower, What has the story of Kodak's demise got to do with the Third Sector?, June 11, 2015, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-has-story-kodaks-demise-got-do-third-sector-lucy-gower. For the Ignition Framework article, see: Jake Nielson, Story of Kodak: how they could have saved the busines, August 22, 2014, https://www.ignitionframework.
④ Josephine Baker (1906–1975) was an African American entertainer who moved to France and was known for her jazz dancing.
⑤ Sarah Baartman (1789–1815) was a Khoikhoi woman from southwestern Africa. Because Europeans in the seventeenth century called this group the Hottentots, she was also known as "the Hottentot Venus." In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, freak shows were all the rage, and Baartman was widely "exhibited" across European countries because of her large buttocks.
⑥ Sea monsters in Greek mythology with human heads and bird bodies, who lived on islands in the waters near Sicily and lured passing sailors with their voices, causing them to lose their senses and wreck their ships.
⑦ A 1998 American film directed by Peter Weir. It tells the story of the protagonist Truman, who encounters one dramatic event after another in his real life, which makes him suspicious of the world around him. In the end he discovers that his whole life has been fake: from the moment he was born, his every move has been filmed and broadcast to a global audience, and he is merely a character in a "reality show."
⑧ Yue Ren, "Every Photograph Has Meaning!", June 16, 2006, http://1416.me/372.html.
⑨ Image sources for this article: Figure 1, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Kamehameha_Royal_Family_by_Hugo_Stangenwald#/media/File:House_of_Kamehameha.jpg; Figure 2, http://www.arpla.fr/canal2/figureblog/; Figure 3, https://www.w-a-i-studio.com/works/here-album; Figure 4, courtesy of Xinhao Cheng; Figure 5, Dongdong Cai, Family History, Wuxiang Studio, 2020, selected, from left to right, from pages 1, 485, and 486 of the book.
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