Family Secrets

I have chosen to write on the family album. Since I was young photography has always fascinated me, it was a way of viewing a world that was different from mine, but viewing it privately, where I could look all I wanted without anyone knowing. I have always been drawn to photography that shows the real, the everyday, and the normal moments that happen in our lives. Photographs that show beauty where you wouldn’t expect to find it, that makes an occasion out of the banal. This is why I have always been drawn to domestic photography and photographers who photograph their own families. From studying these I have in turn come back to my own photographs, and to my history, that has always been photographed and then placed in my family album.

I have become increasingly interested in this subject, and the more I study it, the more I learn about the concept of the family album, the more I start to look for all the patterns and clichés in my own albums, and I try and analyse my family photographs on this academic level. But the one underlying reason that keeps on coming back to me every time I think about looking at the family album, is that I’m really trying to work out what my family photographs mean, what stories they are telling, and what they are hiding. I want to know everything behind every photograph, behind every look, but more importantly I want to know what happens next. As the history of my family keeps on evolving I want to know what will happen to these albums that have held so much mystery and knowledge, I need to know how they will continue.

I have looked at and read a great deal about what the family album means, why we construct them in the way we do, how we look at the photographs, and what they can mean, but I have come to realise that the material is old and outdated, which in turn leads me to ask the question of where the family album is now? Where does it sit in our modern society, and above all, does it still exist?