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.
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.
[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]
[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
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