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.

---

[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.

Over the Hill - Tim Andrews Photography Project

I wasn't going to write about this project initially although it is one that I have been following for a few months.  It's an interesting project. Tim Andrews in not a photographer; I think he used to be a lawyer or something corporate in fact.  But over the last three years he has been photographed by over 300 photographers who he invites to take part in his project.  He started it by answering an advert when a photographer was looking for a model.  The project is interesting in itself because rather than a photographer recording his personal story through a series of self portraits the subject has taken it upon himself to manage that process, turning the usual photographer gaze upside down and inside out.  What makes it even more interesting is the fact that Tim Andrews is also managing an illness and through his project explores the fragility of his ageing body and self.  I have been prompted to write about this project after all because there is a sense of taking control, of agency which is extremely interesting for me and also because of the question of vanity - or lack of it.  Is this a vain project or is it a generous and extremely brave project, where Tim Andrews reveals what he can, through collaborative work, of his frailty and indeed failings, along with the more palatable aspects of who is he is.

My A5 project is currently in some sort of no-mans land while I think about what to do with it.  My aim was to explore a story that was about me and my family.  I have been heavily influenced by my reading of Family Frames by Marriane Hirsh where she discusses the role of family albums/photographs.  I have been particularly struck by the notion of photographs gazing back at us and informing us about who we are meant to be in this modern culture of ours, about who we are within our families.  Mostly people choose to have very flattering and rather unrealistic portrayals of themselves, their families - or am I just being incredibly cynical.  The reality of families, which are usually fraught with internal seen and unseen tensions, admitted and denied fractures, is not what is usually portrayed in the images.  In my A5 work I have tried to capture not only the happy, sweet and enjoyable moments but also some of the more painful moments and aspects of our family.  I am happy to look at these, to try and make sense of them, to use my project to deepen my understanding and empathy for all that is real - the good enough and not so good enough.  Despite having involved my mother in the taking of the photographs, letting her know what I was planning to use them for, she is not happy about the photographs and feel they are intrusive and unflattering, and that I have shown her little respect.  This leaves me in a difficult position.  And I am having to think about how to address this, how to solve it.

Which has led me to think about Tim Andrew's work.  A work where an individual has over the course of several years offered his body and self to artists so that they can explore aspects of him and of course themselves, their perception of age, of illness of maleness, an ageing and unwell body.  It's an extremely generous act - but one that he has been in charge of to some extent.  My mother on the other hand is not in charge of anything to do with my work, and perhaps I was expecting too much of her.  Perhaps not working collaboratively enough although to be fair to myself, I have tried to.  And in any case the work's underlying importance has only over time started to reveal itself to me.

I won't say more about Tim Andrew's project for now.  Take a look at it yourself.  There is a range of photography, some that appeals to me and some that doesn't.  But it's fascinating, especially when you consider how the subject is in control of it.  It's perhaps Tim Andrew's way of taking control of something when he is dealing with an illness that he has little control over.  It's really worth thinking quite about seriously in relation to the book I mention above which I will finish soon and eventually be able to write about.  How I resolve my issue with the images, I am less sure about just now, but am sure I will find a way.

Tim Andrews

A5 Narrative images - impact

"In horror I turned to other poems I had written at Oxford, in East Anglia.  They were no better; even worse.  The truth rushed down on me like a burying avalanche. I was not a poet.

I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to co-exist in the same mind" 

The Magus, John Fowles.

Instead of finishing off Family Frames which I really should be be doing so I can get on with writing the commentary for A5 and then submitting it I have started reading The Magus by John Fowles.  I mention this because the quote above feels pretty accurate about how I feel at the moment about the work I do.  I certainly feel like I have a long way to go before I will truly believe I am a photographer of any worth, although I do not feel hopeless about it.  Just that the work ahead is still to come and it might be a hard slog at times.  There is so much more to photography then mere photographs.

I have been wondering what the images I have taken for the A5 are about really - not just some family photographs but surely, hopefully something more.  Last week I was asked by an online magazine if I would like to be featured after I retweeted an article they had posted.  I was flattered to be asked so said yes, although I do understand that the magazine is small, young, growing and that the internet is starving for fodder, so it is a modest start and one which is good for me no doubt. I am pleased they thought my work was worth the effort.

However, I feel like a fraud and also horrifically exposed for several reasons.  One obvious reason is that I really like naturally to hide under a shell and find any form of recognition, no matter how small, excruciatingly painful and awkward - I have just about got used to the constant 'marketing' I must do if I hope to spread the news about my photography and occasionally get some work.
The other reason I have found this process difficult is because I know now that the work for A5 reveals some intense long held familial rage on my part which I have used unashamedly in the work and how I go about editing and then presenting the work is really something to think very carefully about.  I discovered this because I included one of the more difficult portraits of Evelyn, my mother, in the article and she was of course rather unhappy to have it on FB where I had posted a link to the website.  As I look at the image now, rather than see the slightly clever composition, which I was proudly boasting to myself about, I do see very clearly the expression of her face, and my unkindness or lack of compassion in choosing to use it.  It probably doesn't help me in the least for commercial work either.  I wonder about my motivation for including it there where something less brutal would have done.

Now I must think carefully about how I edit the final piece for submission - although for me the image says a great deal about what the work is about; and if I were to exclude it would I be diluting my work?  Yes, for sure, which is not the point.

All of this does bring up the question of responsibility of the photographer - a huge, complex and contentious issue.

I shall try to quickly finish The Magus which seems like a very important book for me be to be rereading now (perhaps, not only as I do really recognise a lot of the narcissistic pretension of the protagonist) and then get on with Family Frames so I can write up the commentary and submit the work by June which is when it is due - and it is almost upon us!  How did that happen??

Saul Leiter

I came across Saul Leiter via a Twitter connection and ended up watching a wonderful documentary called In No Great Hurry about him.  Apart from the fact that Saul Leiter comes across as a genuinely remarkable and kind person, I absolutely fell in love with his photography.

Saul Leiter was the son of a rabbi and was expected to follow the same path but he abandoned his studies and went to New York at the age of 24 to pursue art.  He was a painter who started using a Leica after being encouraged, and eventually became a fashion photographer.  He became part of what is known as the New York School and was working at the same time as other well known photographers in New York from that era, such as Diane Arbus (he took a portrait of her) and Robert Frank.  He used colour film when it was unusual to do so and his colour street photography is incredibly distinctive and beautiful.

I love his street photography and now have a copy of his book, Early Colour.  You can really see the knowledge he gained as a painter in his photographs and I think his work might be timeless for that reason.  He mediates what he sees and transforms seemingly simple quotidian scenes into something very beautiful.  He is not as well known as some of the other big names from that time but that is changing and I think his work has a quality that will endure.  His style is incredibly expressive and I wonder if a lot of people are emulating (perhaps without realising) what he used to do on various online platforms today.

The colour prints I have looked at explore colour, shapes, reflections and blurred scenes, all of which he uses to create small masterpieces that to my eye will be worth looking at for many, many years going forward.  Saul Leiter was born in 1923 and died in 2013.  Anyone interested should certainly see the film I mention at the top.  It's beautifully made and he is wonderful to listen to.  His lack of grandiosity, his low key modesty, his  kindness and the appreciation of his all the good as well as all the sadness from life is wonderful to witness.

Wikipedia
Guardian

Exercise: Rain

Imagine a magazine cover on one subject: rain.  You have the entire cover space to work with and you should produce a single, attractive, strong photograph that leaves no one in doubt about the subject.

Rain (c)SarahJaneField 2015

This was taken on my iPhone 5c using Camera+ and then edited in Snapseed.  I darkened it and increased the contrast plus sharpened and increased the structure, then turned it upside down so the reflection of the building appeared the right way up.  I hope it leaves no one in any doubt about the subject.

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.