On family photos
I really enjoy looking at family photo albums. I like to see what someone’s parents looked like when they were in their 30s. I like seeing baby photos of adult friends. I like seeing people appear at one wedding and then disappear at the next. I like seeing fashions change alongside house interiors. I like the nostalgia. I also like getting a sense of a family's narrative via the album, or at least how the story is projected. Because, obviously, the moments that are captured and preserved— birthdays, holidays, sports carnivals— are those that the parents thought were important. Because the photo album builds a narrative of family life that accords to some idealized vision. Because the photos that are selected conform to the idea of a family that the parents want to keep for posterity. I like the specific type of intimate propaganda that is the family photo album.
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The other day on my lunch break I wondered into a small gallery nearby where I work that was exhibiting an Australian photographer named Ruth Maddison. It was a career retrospective called "it was the best of times it was the worst of times." Maddison, 75-years-old, is a documentary photographer. Over the years she's taken photos of labour rights protests; the rise of punk; friends and lovers; changeless Australian towns and highways; handsome fisherman; women in factories. Most of all, Maddison has taken pictures of her family. They appear ongoing throughout the exhibition. Her father, Sam Goldbloom, an Australian human rights activist—tall and lanky, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, looking kind of like Larry David at a protest. Her mother, Rosa Segal, a handsome woman with strong cheekbones and a squinty smile. Her three children with straight-mop-like hair whose noses and smiles vaguely resembling their grandparents.
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Maddison married young and had all three of her children before the age of 25. Then she changed her mind. She divorced her husband and travelled the world, came back to Melbourne and started raising her children alongside friends and lovers in the types of share houses described by Helen Garner in Monkey Grip. It was also when she started taking photos. She took her first roll of film after a housemate lent her a camera. Of the 36 frames from that first experiment there are several intimate self-portraits; a photo of her lover naked smoking in bed; a photo of her two younger children standing in the door frame of a bedroom, smiling; one of them all together in the mirror. I got the sense, looking at the photos, that this was a family life with porous boundaries, one where adult world and child world are blended — where sex and love and friendship co-exist very close to one another.
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I also got the sense that documenting this way of living was Maddison's response to what might have been expected of her as a woman and a mother. The moments she chooses to record are literally messy. She takes photos of messy rooms, kids with messy hair, people in various stages of undress. Recording the mess seems to give her a sense of agency about how she was choosing to live. "Using the camera changed my life," she wrote. "I was recording the passage of my life via image making." Recording and presenting these images has been her life's practice ever since. I saw one photo, taken in 2006, entitled Summer Holiday: three women sit in a small room talking. Children are sprawled over them, clutching onto their backs or lying on their laps like small creatures. The sheets are unmade, and the floor is littered with magazines and stuffed toys. It all kind of blends together in one organic mess.
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I read an article the other day about a woman who made a very sudden decision to call off her wedding and end her eight year relationship. She tries to move on but keeps getting little automatic photo "memories" on her phone about her former life. Her photo app sends her pictures of wedding dresses she screenshotted, outfits she tried on, the fried egg she ate the morning she decided to leave him. More than this, because the apps are "smart" and connected to other apps, she is continuously targeted with advertising for married people—honeymoon holidays, nursery decor, anniversary gifts. The algorithmic curation makes her feel trapped. It is like she is being nudged towards a life she doesn't want and tried to leave. "If we already are part cyborg," she writes, "there is a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married. The real me would really like to move on now."
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Some things I've consumed recently: I'm reading Mark Leidner's latest book of poems, Returning the Sword to the Stone. I watched the 1999 sci-fi movie eXistenZ, which is about a video game designer who creates a virtual world that is uncannily real (strangely, it was released just a few months before The Matrix). I read this captivating essay by Namwali Serpell in The New York Review of Books. I have been trying to decide whether or not to buy the recent 800-page Philip Roth biography but this review from David Remnick makes me feel like why bother. I've been watching YouTube videos of Melbourne youth sub-cultures from the 1950s and 1970s. I bought a camera and I'm going to start taking family portraits.