I am currently busy working my way through
Family Frames, Photography Narrative and
Postmemory by Marianne Hirsh. It has
set off all sorts of thoughts in relation to the narrative photographs I have
taken for A5, and I am constantly on the look out for relevant work that might
be worth thinking about. Recently I
stumbled across
a magazine article about women’s pay. Included was an old photographic essay
relating to a wife/mother who worked at a bridal company during the 50s. The essay offers an alterative narrative to
the usual 50s story we are more familiar with where women stayed at home
warming slippers for their husbands whilst keeping their homes in perfect
order.
The images show a husband and wife sharing
the domestic chores, financial decisions and child rearing while a housekeeper
looks after the children as both parents work.
The woman is seen out with her friends at lunch for example, experiencing
a life that is fulfilling and nourishing, and also at home caring for her
children rather perfectly. It seems like
a thoroughly modern and progressive existence.
The problem for me is how very idealistic
this narrative is and it is simply the other side of the supposedly idealistic ‘stay-at-home’
housewife coin. Both images are
suggestive of an impossible and unrealistic life for women to construct their
lives around.
As Hirsh states in her book: ‘Freud’s
‘family romance’ is a shared individual fantasy of mythic origin: the child’s
dream of parental omnipotence and infallibility which, when shattered, becomes
the fantasy of replacing the father with a different, richer and more noble
one, in Freud’s terms, a king or an emperor.
This is more than an Oedipal desire: it is also a fantasy of class
aspiration, an economic fantasy of enrichment.”
It seems to me that each side of the 50s
feminine ideal as illustrated in the essay I have mentioned and in the more
usual images one expects to see from that era is a ‘family romance’ about the
role of the mother. One that persists
today, although it is probably quite surprising to think of the ‘working
mother’ myth having existed so solidly during the 50s too. Women now are perpetually suspended between
these two supposedly opposing positions.
On the one hand today we have stay-at-home-mothers who are made to exist
at the very least along the edges of our economy, if not right outside it,
along with their inconvenient offspring.
Or, working mothers who often feel they have little choice but to leave
their young children in the care of others if they are to keep any career break
to a minimum. (Taking time out is proven
to be detrimental to a woman’s future economic prospects; pension gaps, the
fact they often need to start again from scratch work-wise, part-time work for
those who can get it. Not to mention that long breaks potentially destroy any confidence
about being able to contribute effectively in the work place.)
I am only part way through Hirsh’s Family Frames but one of the overriding
themes I am getting to grips with so far is that the images we surround
ourselves with reinforce ‘myths’ about family, support structures that our
culture for a variety of reasons has constructed about who we all ought to be,
where we should fit, and what is expected of us.
These images are immensely powerful and
reflect who we are back to as well as inform us about who we ought to be – a
complex feedback loop that potentially imprisons us. My interest in particular is about how women
relate to these images.
One of the most striking and perhaps
obvious examples for me is about how women see their breasts in our
culture.
I would like to state very clearly before I
say anything further (as I know how contentious and difficult this issue can be
for women everywhere) that I am in no way condemning any woman’s decision to
breastfeed or bottle feed – how a person chooses to bring up their children is
entirely their own choice.
However, it seems extraordinary to me that
Page 3 has only just stopped being published. Even so, the idea of breasts
being sexualized is reinforced by imagery in advertising, in films, in
magazines and on TV pretty much constantly from the moment we are born. Even our toys reinforce this idea – Barbie,
springs to mind. It is so pervasive and
firmly entrenched in our culture that for many women the fact that their
breasts might be for child rearing is simply anathema.
Katherine Dettwyller is an anthropologist
who has studied breast-feeding cross culturally and across species for her
entire career. She has written countless
articles during her career and the thoroughly researched book, Breastfeeding; Biocultural Perspectives,
amongst others. Detwyller promotes the
notion that formula may one day be seen in the same way we see smoking now –
utterly detrimental to health and emotional well-being.
In her book about breastfeeding she
compares breastfeeding in the West to foot binding in China, which “persisted
well into the 20th century”. “Most Americans view Chinese foot-binding
as the barbaric practice of backward people.
Yet breast augmentation, or female mammary mutilation, as it more
properly called, is essentially the same thing…. A perfectly, healthy,
functioning organ, the breast, is mutilated through surgery into something
useful for only male sexual pleasure.
Rarely is the lactational function of the breast preserved, or even
considered, in breast augmentation surgery.”
I have chosen to concentrate on the subject
of breasts and breastfeeding here because it’s such an extreme example of a
cultural more. In many non-western societies
breasts are seen as organs for feeding children primarily. In Western societies, and societies heavily
influenced by the West, breasts are seen as almost exclusively sexual, to the
point where their biological function is almost obsolete, or seen as strange,
unusual, and even taboo.
I am interested in the power of imagery;
powerful imagery that supports the idea of breasts being exclusively sexual, as well
as the less obvious, harder to discern manipulations of culture, of how we see
ourselves. Let's look beyond the breasts one might say...
One of the most interesting things I have
come across in the Family Frames book so far is Lacan’s idea of looking and
being seen:
“Looking and being looked at are identical
processes for Lacan – when you look you are also seen: when you are the object
of the look you return it, even if only to reflect light back to its source;
‘things look at me and yet I see them” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 109). I need to know and understand more of
this before I can discuss it in further depth but the reflective nature of seeing is
fascinating to me.
When describing Meatyard’s Family Album of LucyBell Crater (which incidentally I
love and can’t wait to do something heavily influenced by Meatyard’s work!)
Hirsh talks of subjects being “constructed relationally through an elaborate
and multiply inflected process of looking”,
which as I understand it ties in with Lacan’s looking and seeing thesis.
I feel like I have only got fragments of
different ideas and haven’t quite tied them together yet but I am intrigued by
how this seeing and looking process informs our state of being given that we
are constantly bombarded with images that inform us about who we are, that
construct our being. Which means that the
whole breast thing might be impossible for women to reconcile, given the imagery we
are surrounded by every moment of our lives, and breasts are just one tiny and
very obvious example - look further.
If I were to think about how women and
indeed men are generally represented in photographs as well as other mediums,
and also about how that looking and being looked at process works, it seems
we are indefatigably caught up in an interplay that is a little like a snake
eating its own tale. The gaze that we
choose to exist in front of, coming from the images that we create perpetuate
the fantasies we construct about ourselves in those very images.
How does any of that tie in with my
assignment? Well, I’m not sure yet. Family
Frames discusses how family photographs ‘produce family relations and form
family memory’. I
have taken a series of photographs of my family, which in the main centre round
my mother, with whom I have had a difficult and fragmented relationship,
although much has changed recently.
At the beginning of this very long post (in
which I try hard to bring together several strands of thought and perhaps a
bunch of disparate ideas, all of which I hope feed into my assignment) I
discussed the idealistic photographic essay about a mother in the 50s. On the surface the essay seems like a
positive alternative narrative which opposes the more usual 50s story we are
used to seeing, where women wait cheerily for their husbands to return home
while they happily get on with domestic chores before welcoming their
hardworking men home. And it certainly
seems more positive than the overly sexualised images we are all bombarded
with, which as I discuss negate any biological realities about who we are.
However, I found the idealism in that essay
just as awkward and difficult as its counterpart.
Family photography is typically idealistic;
and in fact I make a few pennies taking photographs for families that serve to reinforce
those idealistic fantasies. They are
seemingly so important to families within our culture – and I wonder how
helpful that is. Hirsh says “the family
as social construct depends on the invisibility of its structuring
elements. Inasmuch as visuality
functions as such a structuring element determined by the familial gaze, its
workings to some degree must remain unconscious if the familial ideology is to
be perpetuated and imposed”
For A5 I have taken a series of
photographs, which I hope will reveal some of the realities of our family what
ever those are, rather than the ideal – although I’m not sure at this point how
possible that even is. At the moment,
however, every time I look at them I find myself crying… so who knows that they
are doing or saying.
I end by repeating the quote from
Hirsh’s book, “Looking and being looked at are identical processes for Lacan –
when you look you are also seen: when you are the object of the look you return
it, even if only to reflect light back to its source; ‘things look at me and
yet I see them” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 109). This sentence seems incredibly important
somehow.
