Family Frames by Marianne Hirsh

It took me a while to make my way through Marianne Hirsh’s book Family Frames.  The book is so dense with information that it is quite impossible to retain all of it. I think the best thing for me to do here is to concentrate on the themes that I have absorbed, things that I can apply to my own work as it continues to develop; and as my understanding of what photography might be evolves.  I have to say, the more I learn, the more the notion of what a photograph might be is unraveling.  Not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

There are perhaps four reasonably solid ideas I take away from the book:

The first being that the family album serves to sustain the notion of family, reinforcing our ideas of how that institution is shaped and how we might fit into it.  Hirsh says early in the book, “At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[1].

The next big subject that really got me thinking was the idea of the “Gaze” and unconscious optics.  I had come across the gaze earlier in the course but Hirsh looks at the impact of looking, seeing and being seen.  She explores Lacan’s mirror theory and the chapter on this has made me eager to discover more.  Unconscious optics fascinated me;  the screens through which we view the world and thinking about the gaze, how we imagine those looking at us, in the flesh or within a photograph, might perceive us. 

Hirsh then looks at the role of mothers and photography; how the camera interrupts the maternal gaze, transforms it, and ultimately renders the maternal viewpoint, including her fantasies, tangible in the form of a photograph.

Lastly, although by no mean exclusively, as the book really covers a great deal more, is the notion of post-memory which has really struck a chord with me.  Those long held family myths that stem from before one’s own arrival in the world, and which inform so much about how a family operates and sees itself in relation to the world outside of it, and within it.

I will aim to cover each of those aspects in this essay, which forms the basis of my research for Assignment 5.

The Family Romance

The way in which families operate across cultures and history varies significantly and according to Meredith F Small in her book, Our Babies Ourselves, is dependent in large part on the economic needs of the society.  She refers to research that compares urban and agrarian societies, for instance: “In more urban-industrial societies, Le Vine suggests, parents don’t need much from their children because the economic system is constructed so the children are peripheral…*”[2] as opposed to agrarian societies where children are more central and very much expected to contribute to the economic activities of the society, i.e. they will work in the fields, for example.

So it is interesting for me to think about why families take photographs of themselves, which in turn gaze back, reinforcing a fixed idea about how that family should look and be.  We seem to need to believe the way we (whoever we might be) do it is the only way or perhaps the right way.

Hirsh’s second chapter is titled Reframing the Human Family Romance and covers various aspects of myth making with family photography but it is her exploration of Steichen’s Family of Man, which at the time was by far the most successful photographic exhibition to date, that resonated with me most. 

The exhibition is on the surface a celebration of the human family.  There are photographs from all over the world, by famous and not so famous photographers, of people and families; starting with lovers, then pregnancy and babies, then on to play, family, work, war, religion and government.   The way in which it is presented suggests that we humans are essentially all the same – despite our different and varying cultures. 

The power in that message is delivered with considerable force due to the nature of photography.

Hirsh says, “The illusion that photographs simply record a pre-existing external reality, the fact that photographs freeze particular moments in time, and the ambiguity that results from the still picture’s absent context all help to perpetuate a mythology of the family as stable, static and monolithic.”[3]

The Family of Man exhibition sold the idea of a “globalized, utopian, family album, a family romance imposed on every corner of the earth”.[4] 

Hirsh goes on to discuss Freud’s notion of the family romance being “a shared individual fantasy of mythic origin: the child’s dream of parental omnipotence and infallibility…” and then “The Family of Man disseminates the fantasies of Steichen and his contemporaries…”[5]

In my mind it is hardly surprising that this sort of mythology, the mythology of a paternalistic, Western, middle class ideal, Freud’s family romance, should be collectively conceived and expressed at that particular point in history.  Why wouldn’t a scarred and traumatised society who had just come out of a global conflict in which many millions of people were brutally slaughtered on all sides, and in the case of the Holocaust, whole towns and communities systematically murdered, need to see the world as a global family who fitted in with an ideal.  Of course that traumatised society, rightly or wrongly, wanted to perpetuate the fantasy of a family romance across the entire globe.  It would be, considering the recent extreme trauma, a mythology that Western society should very much want and perhaps need to buy into. 

Photography offers a powerful reflection of those fantasies which because of its capacity for perpetuating “an illusion of pre-existing reality” can be used by a society in one way or another, commercial advertising as well as cultural exhibition, to convince itself of a reality that is more palatable than the reality they have just experienced.

Hirsh explores the troubling aspects of this wholesale rejection of cultural difference, saying “One could argue that Steichen follows Parsons in promoting the patriarchal bourgeois nuclear family as the norm and standard against which other arrangements are measured.” And “the exhibit invokes nature over culture, thus diminishing, if not erasing, pronounced differences due to culture and history, and thus also naturalizing and sentimentalising the institution of family”[6].   I think this is worth considering whether you’re thinking in micro or macro terms.

Unconscious Optics

I was absolutely fascinated to read about unconscious optics.   Our perception of life, of people, of ourselves are all filtered and mediated through unconscious optics.  I don’t think this was news to me but the level of exploration and the introduction of Lacan’s mirror stage certainly triggered lots of thoughts.  I have always been fascinated by varying cultures and about how people from different parts of the world relate to the word.  I find it extraordinarily interesting for instance, that a tribe in South America (frustratingly I don’t have access to the documentary so have no way of giving any further details) make beer out of saliva.  To us in the West this seems incredible and I have to admit as I watched it I felt revulsion as I saw people drink the frothy fermented liquid.  These differences in culture are so deeply and firmly held that it makes a bit of a nonsense of the Family of Man’s promotion; where we are all ‘naturialized’ in accordance with a Western patriarchal bourgeois model.  The chapter on unconscious optics looks at how we ‘see’ through our cultural and historical screens, and how we have very little control over that since we don’t really have access to our unconscious minds where the foundations for this screens stem from. 

The term ‘unconscious optics’ comes from Walter Benjamin, and Hirsh uses it throughout the book and in particular in relation to Lacan’s notion of the gaze, or look.  I wrote about this earlier on this blog so won’t go into much here but the idea of a looking and seeing, reflecting and being seen all being intrinsically related and caught up in how we build our realities is incredibly interesting for me.  Hirsh goes on to say that the ‘family as a social construct depends on the invisibly of its structuring elements.  Inasmuch as visuality functions as a structuring element determined by the familial gaze, its workings must to some degree remain unconscious”.[7]

This fed into my thoughts about how I would approach A5 and what I hoped to get out of it.  Photography, however seems to have the capability and potential to both perpetuate the myth of the family romance and expose some of its invisible structures – perhaps even do both concurrently. 

Walter Benjamin, who Hirsh quotes, discusses Edward Mybridges series of horses running:

“Evidently a different nature opens itself up to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.  Even if one has general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride… Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.”

We as a culture, when putting together family albums at any rate opt for feeding into the myths, the romance.  The details of everyday life, the quotidian mundaneness is not typically focused on.  But what I found in my own project is that emerges regardless, and even when it is, the mythology is very difficult to quash.  So, my photographic interventions may have revealed some of the structural relationships within our family or perhaps exposed some of the tensions, but my edit nevertheless feeds into the notion of a family romance, albeit a more than slightly tense one. 

Post Memory

Hirsh describes post memory as one of the most important or influential unconscious screens or optics.  By this she is referring to the history of a family, not only theirs but also of the family’s community.  I was very interested in this aspect especially since Hirsh’s Jewish family was from Romania, and like so many during WW2, relatives she never knew were deported or killed.  Whole communities wiped out.  The legacy of this history continues to inform generations since and I certainly relate to this as my own family, as I have mentioned in previous blog posts, were from Czechoslovakia.  My father’s father, as far as I am aware, was one of very few Fried’s to have escaped the Final Solution, having left for England before the war began.

I touch on post memory briefly here because it seemed like an incredibly important aspect of the book, and of how we see in general, plus how families see  - both as individuals within the family plus as a group looking inwards and out.  The sense of persecution, guilt, and pain, deeply held horror that exists within families who have a history linked to the Holocaust is immensely powerful and influential.  I am reminded of the book about Diane Arbus and a quote I used when writing about it –

“We grew up in an emotional desert of shame - never affirmation - and those of us who were taught to be assimilated were filled with self-loathing'"[8].  

Everything that I have written about here, all that has resonated with me seems to be at least in part due to the post-memory of my own family.  Not only the Holocaust connection but also the Victorian ethic that pervaded my mother’s upbringing.

I remembered the following quote for years although could not recall where I had read it until I picked up The Magus recently to reread. 

“”I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.”[9]

The post memory in our family that pertains to that ‘monstrous dwarf’ resonates today and I have long been aware of it, especially in relation to the family mythology (as opposed to family romance – by mythology I refer to the stories within a family that get told again and again over the years) which I have listened to since yearly childhood.  For instance I was told repeatedly about how my mother was punished and shamed for undressing her doll in front of boys at an early birthday party, or how she undressed herself at boarding school and stood on the window ledge for passers by to see (mostly boys I am led to understand).  These stories feed into our perception of ourselves, our families and how we see; looking inwardly and outwardly. In other words, family mythology and post memory are integral parts of those unconscious optics.

Mothers and photography

The final aspect to the book (and I have in no way covered everything), which I found useful in terms of A5 at any rate, is the chapter about mothers and mother photographers.  Lacan’s gaze is important here because of the idea that a child’s development is dependent on a loving gaze from their primary carer, which in most cases tends to be the mother. 

The role of the mother in mammalian development has long been understood to be critical for healthy, well-adjusted, functioning mammals.  John Bowlby’s attachment theory was hugely influential and for instance led to a change in the way children are hospitalized, so that care is taken to keep consistent and regular contact with parents, and in cases of very young children, constant during a child’s stay. 

Although only one aspect of the symbiotic relationship between mother a child, the gaze between these two, and other members of the family informs and influences the way in which a child develops.  In Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book, Mothers & Others[10], there is a diagram indicating just how much of a human’s brain is given over to communicating, seeing, looking understanding, receiving and giving information – and although the eyes are by no mean the only part of this process, seeing, looking and being seen are integral. (The question of blindness brings up many questions when thinking about Lacan’s theories and I can only say at this point that the subject is so complex I can’t quite get my heard around it for now, however, I wanted to flag it up that I am aware of it!)  (You can see the full article inlcuding the diagram I mention here - page 75) . 

Hirsh looks at how there has been criticism of mothers who photograph their children and amongst others she focuses on Sally Mann whose Immediate Family is so well known, and which generated such a strong response, both positive and negative.  She discusses how the looking that goes on between a mother and her children, looking that is essential to a developing sense of self, is said to be disrupted when eyes are replaced by a camera, changing the mother’s organic eye into a machine.  And therefore replacing the process of looking with a “gaze”.  As I have seen and understood it the word gaze is pejorative; it is power based and I have noticed often used to describe the activity of male artists creating female nudes over the centuries.  Hirsh doesn’t fully accept the negative ramifications of turning a mother’s look into a gaze and explores various positions surrounding what feels to me enormously difficult and contentious. 

“Mann’s children can see in her photographs the operation of the gaze; they can see how the maternal look can be displaced by a maternal gaze.  The images show them how culture sees children, what fears and fantasies structure childhood and therefore structures them”.  She also goes on to say that Mann’s children ”demonstrate some control over the perpetuation of their images… they can manipulate the images through their own play with costume and make-up; they can mimic and thus play with the childhood into which the maternal gaze – even if it is seen as disembodied, monstrous, phallic and devitalizing  - has fixed on them”.[11]

Mann argues that “Photographing them in those quirky, often emotionally charged moments has helped me to acknowledge and resolve some of the inherent contradictions between the image of motherhood and reality”.[12]

The difference between reality and pre-conceptions of what that reality ought to be is what interests me mostly.  It ties in with the opening paragraphs of this (rather long!) blog entry-

“At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[13].

I think Mann in this instance has perhaps turned that on it’s head by taking photographs that defy the usual self-presentations, challenges the status quo and instead deals with a different reality, one that links to our very real and in some cases justified fears about childhood and sexuality, as well as fantasy, play, and the idea of children being separate from real humanity.

Conclusion 

Before I end I will briefly say that Hirsh covers a great deal about the Holocaust and I am a bit lost with some or much of it – although I find myself drawn to these chapters due to my own family links I feel I will need to revisit those chapters when I have understood and digested bit more about the role of photography and linking us to our histories.

Overall, the book has deepened my understanding of what photography might be, carrying on from my reading of Barthes and then James Elkin.  Hirsh does adumbrate some of Barthes theories, which is always useful.  It must all be very much on my mind though because last night I dreamt a photograph of mine was hanging in a restaurant.  In it there were trees, a stream and a group of children, some of whom I think were mine.  And every time I looked at the photograph I noticed the children come to life and start playing.  When I looked away they stopped.  They couldn’t leave the photograph, they were tiny but they were real - although real in another reality and one that I could not actually climb into.  And that is what I think I have learned about photography – the illusion of reality is immensely powerful even though it can never be real.  The photograph is nothing more than a flat representation of a version of reality at one particular moment in time, made up of dots on a screen or pigment on paper.  And that is all it will ever be.  But our brains expect a photograph to be real because it looks real, and so our brain does what it can to make it seem real.  Editing, in the case of a series of photographs, adds to the illusion.  This makes photography an extremely powerful tool for advertisers and makers of propaganda the world over.

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[1] Page 9 Family Frames

[2] Our Babies Ourselves Meredith F Small page 54 Anchor Books 1998 *I would argue that within our present cultural paradigm women are expected to make a choice about whether or no they want to exist on the on the periphery with their children or else abandon the caregiving role of mothering in order to be at work.  Although this is changing with more sustainable maternity laws, and in some countries for both parents.

[3] Page 51 Family Frames

[4] Page 51 Family Frames

[5] Page 52 Family of Man

[6] Talcott Parsons – Structural Functionalism

[7] Page 117 Family Frames

[8] Diane Arbus: A Biography By Patricia Bosworth, Open Road - Integrated Media, Published 1984, Kindle Edition 2012

[9] Page 15, The Magus by John Fowles, Kindle Edition, Vintage, New Edition 2004, First published 1965.

[10] Page 40, Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Belknap Harvard, 2009

[11] Page 159 & 160 Family Frames

[12] Page 161 Family Frames (Sally Mann quoted)

[13] Page 9 Family Frames

First public display of some of my work

Last Friday a whole bunch of people, mostly friends, came to a local cafe and looked at some of my photographs which have been put up there and I even sold quite a few.  It was nerve wracking and exciting and I was very pleased to have been asked by the owners to provide the images in the first place.

Here is a link to the images: Wandsworth Colour

Someone local printed them for me and did a very good job.  My lack of printing knowledge frustrated me as I know from talking to Sharon Boothroyd that she did her own printing.  This is something I imagine will be good to learn about.

When I was first asked to do something we agreed that it should be local but that was my only direction.  I had been taking photographs of walls already, I guess copying other styles I had seen on Flickr at the time.  But then I started to wonder why "walls' as I became a little wall-centric for a while.  An obvious but rather pedestrian and unimaginative interpretation might be something to do with a lack of people in my life but that doesn't resonate with me  - especially as I am lucky enough to have lots of people in my life really.

I think rather if one had to try to interpret my focus on walls, it pertains to structure.  I suppose as the structure in my life was utterly devastated three years ago, my photographs are a reinforcement of the structure that I need, want and indeed am rebuilding as time passes.  I am surrounded by a strong sense of community which is extremely important to me and the landscape in which I exist, my home, provides a secure structure for me and my family.  As I photograph those real structures I somehow reinforce the internal ones which are so crucial to living.

The other thing that walls represent to me are a kind of metaphysical set of boundaries.  Less disparate societies than ours seemed to have had a much clearer societal infrastructure than ours.  We have so many cultures converging, giving us many more choices; but it also makes it harder to be certain of those internal structures that we really, really need.

My own internal structures have always been shaky, perhaps in part due to having grown up abroad but always told I was not of that country, born to a father whose family were wiped out in the second world war, and then like so many children, had to contend with the divorce of my parents.  I will talk more about this when I write up Family Frames.  My pictures of walls seem to me to be very much about trying to establish and envisage some firm internal boundaries when they have been lacking for so long.

Anyway, in the end I was very pleased to have shown my work to people.  Really pleased that so many bought prints.  And I look forward to doing it again!  Here's a link to my other blog about it.

Family Frames - Unconscious Optics, Seeing, Screens

I am still making my way through the book, Family Frames.  Its a very difficult book and I should no doubt have read a couple of other key texts before trying to tackle this one.  Although what it has done for me is made me very eager to go back and finish Sontag's On Photography which has sat languishing on my chest of draws for months abandoned a third of the way through.  I must also tackle Ways of Seeing,  I know.  Nevertheless, I am enjoying what I can in Family Frames and am intrigued and excited by unconscious optics.

Hirsh explains that we look at flat pictures which have the illusion of depth, that we see them through multi-layers of screens such as religion, culture, personal history, romantic illusions - but that photographs are a slice of an unconscious moment.  And being so offer up details we would otherwise not see.  I remember discussing how I am beginning to enjoy photography as it lets me know what is going on with me at an unconscious or semi-conscious level.  In the same way the minute physical details which can be seen in Muybridge's horses.  Photographs also show us the minute psychological details of our lives; thoughts, interests, moods.  Things that are wholly or partially hidden by consciousness.

Jung talks about becoming enlightened by making the unconscious conscious, and that includes becoming aware of the darkest aspects of ourselves.  Photography seems to offer a way of enabling that need.

I am also thrilled to read about screens.  When I started looking at different cultural childrearing practises I remember thinking it doesn't matter how many books are written about this methodology or that one - people will gravitate towards the ideologies that fit with their own personal outlook on life, be those outlooks conscious or otherwise.  Many of mine were not conscious when I first had a child.  I had a totally unrealistic view of who I am and was utterly uninformed and unaware about myself.  Having children unravelled and unearthed parts of me that I had no idea about, and I am happy to say I was pleasantly surprised by some of what came to the surface but also horrified later by other less easy to live with aspects of myself.  Photography is doing the same thing.  And I am reading how photography is also looked at by individuals and societies through ideologies that are conscious and unconscious; screens.

"Looking occurs in the interface between the imaginary and the symbolic.  It is mediated by complex cultural, historical, and social screens."

However, she goes on to say;

"Photographs may capture some of this process, but, as the opaque and masked images of Luthi, Meatyard, and Sherman illustrate, they alone do not allow us to read its many dimensions."

This second sentence is important for me to remember in all of this.  My family narrative photographs may on the one hand be revealing for me (perhaps others too...) but they may also be frustratingly opaque.  I think I have set out to explore something about my relationship with my mother in those photographs and am certain what I have discovered is something I knew intellectually but couldn't see as have been looking through daughter's eyes.  The photographs on the one hand do indeed show me what I knew but couldn't see - and that's what makes me cry when I look at them.  But I suspect there is also much I cannot read, stuff that is hidden regardless of the camera's helpful trick of suspending moments in a frame.

I continue to read...

Other books that have been recommended are The Imaginary Signifier by Christian Metz and Questions of Visual Pleasure by Laura Malvey, both of which look at Lacan's Mirror image and seeing ideas.  I am not sure whether to tackle these before I get that Sontag one digested!  However, I am keen to read her now which I wasn't before because it is dense, verbose and challenging in the extreme.

Quotes from Family Frames as before page 118.

Some thoughts on A5, Family Frames & Breasts

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.”[1]

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 20^th century”[2]. “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.”[3]

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[4]”, 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’[5]. 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”[6]

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.

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Family Frames Photogaphy and Narrative Postmemory by Marianne Hirsh 1997, Harvard Publishing, reissued 2012 (FF)

Breastfeeding Biocultural Perspectives Ed. by Patricia Stuart-Macadam & Katherine A. Dettwyler, Aldine de Gruyer 1995 (BF)

[1] Page tbc FF

[2] Page 177 BF

[3] Page 177 BF

[4] Page 107 FF

[5] Page 116 FF

[6] Page 117 FF

Quick catch up about where I am Narrative 5

I have come home from Italy with plenty of images and I do think I will be able to complete the narrative assignment with these photos.  I need to live with them for a bit before deciding on which route to go.  At first I thought I thought it would be a narrative about my time in Italy with my boys but the photographs do seem to focus primarily on my mother - so the narrative is about my relationship with her I suspect.

I am torn between colour or black & white but tending towards B&W for now.  I'm quite sad to be converting some of the images as they work so well in colour but the overall tone works better in B&W to be honest - well, that's how I feel for now.  I do not have a preference in the main for either and think it's best to see how each project progresses, but it's lovely to see colour images when they work well. (I have just learned about Saul Leiter who was big on colour and I am awaiting arrival of his book so I can write about him, having watched a marvellous documentary - what a lovely, lovely man he seems to have been, quite apart from anything else.)

Here is one image in colour that works very well and consequently I am not sure I will use it at all if I do decide to go the B&W route.  It's a shame to have to let go of images that I like so much - but I have to think about the whole rather than each individual image.

Evelyn in Italy
(c)sarahjanefield 2015

That reminds me, I am reading Family Frames which is wonderful although very difficult - there is a lot that goes over my head because I do not have sufficient understanding or knowledge.  I am learning all about Lacan and Gestalt theory at the moment - well, I say all about... what I mean is touching on it and getting a tiny inkling.  There is so much to learn!!  Needless to say what I am reading will inform the way I edit and present the work. I am eager to get the project in but I am learning that images can tell me an awful lot if I wait for some time to pass before beginning to try and understand them a little.

So, I have a rain picture to take, some reviews to write up about photographers, projects as well as the Family Frames book, and of course the editing to do for A5.  It feels a bit overwhelming (especially as I also have some paid work to catch up on, although thankfully not too much).  I can only do one thing at a time though so will use the time I have and not rush things I think.

Further thoughts about using my own family for A5

When I edited this I was surprised to see an additional refection of myself taking a photograph of me in the background, seemingly across the street from where I am.  For me this is a wonderful illustration of what I describe below.  

I have started the book, Family Frames by Marianne Hirsh.  Admittedly I did not get very far; as soon as I start reading anything my eyes start to close, no matter how interesting.  Something to do with having 3 kids running riot round me most of the time, no doubt.  However, the little bit I did read started me thinking.  The book starts with a quote from Camera Lucida and describes the well known photograph Barthes looks at of his mother in the Winter garden and how he searches for the essence of her.

Not all photographs manage to get even close to capturing the essence of someone and Barthes himself struggles to find what he's searching for.  Something about the Winter Garden image simply epitomises his mother for him.  When you look at the plethora of selfies today, I think it would be difficult to suggest that many of those communicate anything essential and precious about their takers - or maybe I'm being horribly judgemental.  I don't think there is anything wrong with selfies per se at all - but the 'pout lip look' is tricky not to find ridiculous.

I'm not sure about capturing the essence of someone.  People's essences are in a constant state of flux. But I do know for sure that photography does seem to capture the essence of a moment, and fix it in whatever state it's eventually rendered, print, jpg, Facebook selfie.

In Gerry Badger's book, The Genius of Photography, photography in its early days was described as a memory trace and I liked that description.  What it records may be something frivolous and unimportant, or it may be more substantial, deeper and meaningful.

I have been thinking for a while about my own relationship with photography; and it is something I mentioned briefly to someone on Flickr the other day.  I seem to use photography at the moment as a means not only of expressing myself, but as a means of communicating with some inner me -the unconscious me that is difficult to hear much of the time.  The cacophony of day to day living means I barely know what day it is - for which I was accused of being indefatigably stupid the other day (I won't say by whom but you can probably hazard a good guess).  And so, it's not always easy to remain mindful and in tune with myself.  Because I take photographs all day every day those 'memory traces' seem to inform me of things that my little soul wants me to be consciously aware of.  Our brains our so powerful but we rarely take notice of everything that is going on around us.  Modern living makes it all but impossible - but when I look at the photographs I have been taking I can see what I was noticing that day, or in any particular moment.  And we notice the things that are on our minds.

So or instance - when I first bought a Seat car, I have to say, I don't think I've ever heard of Seat before really.  But suddenly I noticed there were Seats everywhere.  There is nothing magical in this - it's just the brains way of working.  In the same way, if something is on my mind then I find my photographs are full of imprints of those thoughts, conscious and unconscious;  which is very handy actually.

I do wonder if I'd had access to photography as I use it now, if I would have struggled with anxiety for so many years.  I do believe that anxiety, in my case anyway, was a result of ignoring my inner voice and not listening to what my little soul was trying to tell me during those years.  So photography does me an awful lot of good, it has to be said.

In light of that, I think it will be really interesting to use photography to record my 'memory traces' during my upcoming trip to Italy, and perhaps use the results for A5.

The house in Italy is my mothers.  She and her late husband bought it when they took early retirement and moved out there about 15 years ago.  Sadly, he died suddenly of a heart attack after 5 years. Although my mother would like to sell the house, it is worth not much more than they paid for it due to the sate of the Italian economy, and so we are lucky enough to have somewhere to visit abroad. However, it is not an easy place for me to be.  As I have discussed very briefly in an earlier post, like many mother/daughter relationships, ours has not not always been easy one.  I find the house awkward to be in and histories and relationship structures, not to mention internal landscapes seem to be imprinted on the place in way that is very uncomfortable for me.  Literally.

However, I am a very different person to the one I was last year, certainly the year before and so on. As the work I have done while on this course seems to document a process of grieving, coming to terms with and beginning to get over a divorce, I think it will be fascinating for me to see what my inner voice has to tell me about where we are all now - at that house in Italy which has been quite a significant place for me over the years for one reason or another.

Finally, I am mindful of the fact that Larry Sultan staged many of the images in his work about his parents and I will probably do some of that too; and see what what comes of it.