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Photographs do not simply serve as visual mementos of a family's past. Through its inherent conventions the camera and its by-products, the photographic image and the family album, help to construct and perpetuate the ideology of the family whilst simultaneously acting as an equalizing force in society. The function of the family photograph does not dissolve at this point. Family photographs and snapshots also preserve ancestral history and perpetuate memories, thereby acting as a means of familial self-representation.
When George Eastman invented the Kodak in 1888, his intended consumers were not professional photographers but people who had seen photographs but had not actually thought of taking them any more than they thought of painting pictures etc. With the slogan You push the button, we do the rest, (Bishop, P. 1999, Photography Lecture notes, week one) its affordability for those with modest means, and its mobile nature the camera allowed; the poor to see themselves preserved and everyone to have access to the visual illusions which photography exhibits. (Hirsch, 1981) The camera entered the domain of the ordinary and the domestic. It was a form of representation which cut across classes, disguised social differences, and produced a sympathy of the exploiters with the exploited. Thus photography quickly became the family's primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation-the means by which the family memory would be continued and perpetuated, by which the family's story could be told. In this sense the photograph functioned as a kind of equalizing force to the masses, democratisation was achieved through the image by enabling all families to look more or less alike (Hirsch, 1981).
The definition or ideology of family as an autonomous group-spiritual state, a bond of nurturance-independent constituted and self-containing... (Hirsch, 1981, pp. 32 - 35) emerged in the renaissance period a time of social and economic instability. Today, in contemporary society, the photographs social functions are still integrally tied to the ideology of the family. For example the compulsive smiles in the snapshots of today insist on the claim of the family group to provide satisfying and enduring relationships, just as the calm dignity of earlier pictures emphasized the formality of family ties. So today, at a time when a family group-at least in the overdeveloped west, is fragmented and atomized, images continue to be produced which reassure us of its solidity and cohesion. (Sanders, 1981) The family photo both shows the cohesion of the family and is an instrument of togetherness; it both chronicles family rituals and constitutes a prime objective of those rituals.
Therefore the concept of the family as a corporation with no individual will or ego is one of great social utility and psychological appeal, crossing the boundaries of time. (Hirsch, 1981) At the end of the twentieth century the family photograph, widely available as a medium of familial self-representation in many cultures and sub-cultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images that real families cannot uphold. (Sanders, 1981) The fact that photos draw on the theme of unity and cohesiveness. This assures us that the family as an institution can overwhelm and control our impulses by promoting community over self-history over moment therefore sustaining the myth Although the family photograph has mirrored the stability of society's ideology of the family, it has also captured the transformation of the function of the family from a working productive group, in the late nineteenth century, to its contemporary function as a leisure-time group, involved in consumption and the utilisation of spare time. (Sanders, 1988) This transformation in the function of the family is consistent with the history of contemporary families, which is concerned more with disruption, dispossession, and cultural religious and ethnic mixing. This is due to the rise of capitalism and industrialism in society, a society whose reality lies in high wages and populations arranged in centres of consumption. This global economic system wrenches families apart as the need for low paid workers and low priced commodities create unemployment and forces men and women to move between towns and continents in search of security.
This is a reality where many family members are only drawn together for the heightened moments which appear in family albums, for example Christmas time and family holidays. (Holland &# 038; Spence, 1988) The sites that family and holiday snaps choose as the space for forming their meaning; beaches, tourist attractions, restaurants and the lounge room, correspond with the actual shift in what the family actually does or its function in contemporary society (Sanders, 1981). Because the photograph gives the illusion of being a simple transcription of the real, a trace touched directly by the event it records, it has the effect of naturalizing cultural practices and of disguising their stereotyped and coded characteristics. As photography immobilizes the flow of family life into a series of snapshots, it perpetuates familial myths while seeming merely to record actual moments in family history (Hirsch, 1981). It doesnt abandon the ancient metaphors of the family as a cohesive units but transforms and spreads them (Hirsch, 1981, pg. 36). Snapshots are also means by which families can make sense of their wider world.
They are objects which take their place amongst other objects which are part of a family's personal and collective past, part of the detailed and concrete existence with which we gain some control over our surroundings and negotiate with the particularity of our circumstances. The art of taking a snapshot has become part of that event-and perhaps the most important part; for, however untidy or unsatisfactory the experience, we can ensure that the picture will project the appropriate emotions into the future. The childrens party may bring tantrums, but the pictures will show laughter (Hirsch, M. , 1997). The holiday may be spoilt by rain, nut it will be the sunny day that will make it into the family album. The longed for cohesion of the family group is secured in the imagery, each individual moment set to take its place in the measured progress of the generations (Hirsch, 1981) Family photographs are also about memory and memories: that is they are about stories of a -past shared by a group of people that in that moment of sharing, produces the family.
They not only act as a type of evidence, on paper or plastic, which ensures an individuals or families visual immortality (Hirsch, 1981, p. 44), but also, through their construction, allow a family to forge their own memory and give insights through their interpretation into a family's present condition (Stephen, 1993). In this process, family photos are often deployed, shown and talked about in a series, usually in a meta-photographic text called the family album. Family photographs are displayed one after another, their selection and ordering into family albums as meaningful as the photographs themselves (Hirsch, M. , 1997). The whole, the series, constructs a family story in some respects like a classical narrative- linear, chronological; through the cyclical repetition of climatic moments- births, christenings, weddings, holidays, and death through absences. In the process of producing, using, selecting, ordering and displaying photographs, the family is actually in process of making itself (Bishop, P. Photography lecture notes, week seven).
Memories evoked by these photos do not simply spring out of the images themselves, but are generated in an internet of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments (Holland and Spence, 1991)... we in vest our own album with the weight of childhood experience, searching it for information, poring into it our unfulfillable desires. We bring an emotional involvement as well as a practical knowledge to the people we find between its covers. (Holland &# 038; Spence, 1991, p. 2) So, in this sense, family photographs show not so much as what was there, as how we once were: to evoke memories which might have little or nothing to do with what is actually in the picture. The photographs act as a prop, a prompt: they set the scene for recollection while at the same time... preventing nostalgia, from embellishing too much on the actual features of our past. (Hirsch, 1981, p. 45) Alternatively however, because family photographs allow the past to be at our fingertips, familial moments as experienced, are a little less important than they used to be. Memories can be available and evoked through photographs for instant replay, they can be taken and stored for later review.
In this process of storing memory family photographs reveal details, whilst simultaneously obscuring the ambiguities, ironies and contradictions of life so that the present becomes trivialized. (Hirsch, 1981, p. 45) Photographic practice only exists and subsists for most of the time by virtue of its family function or rather by the function conferred upon it by the family group, namely that of solemnizing and immortalizing the high-points of family life, of reinforcing the integration of the family group, by reasserting the sense that it has of both its self and its unity, (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 19) Bourdieu's thoughts on photographic practice and its function to the family supports the notion that family photographs have the capacity to serve as more than a physical memento of a family's past or history. Although Bourdieu has demonstrated the integral connection between the ever-spreading practice of photography and the ideology of the modern family, the extent of photography's function to the family stretches further. Family photographs also play a role in the construction of memory, through its conventions and usage it provides the family with a means of forging its own means of self-representation whilst simultaneously portraying the ancient ideology of the family as a stable cohesive unit. References Hirsch, J. 1981, Family Photographs, New York: OUP, in Photography, the Image and Society Course Readings Semester One 1999, University of South Australia, Adelaide. Hirsch, M. 1997, Family Frames-photography, narrative and post memory, USA: Harvard College Press.
Holland, P. , &# 038; Spence, J. 1991, Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, London: VIRAGO PRESS. Sanders, N. 1981. Notes on Portraiture in Photo-Discourse, ed. Brereton, K. , Sydney College of the Arts, in Photography, the Image and Society Course Readings Semester One 1999, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Sanders, N. 1988, Angles on the Image in Communication and Culture. Ed. Kress, G. , pp. 132 - 154, Sydney: NSW University Presss, in Photography, the Image and Society Course Readings Semester One 1999, University of South Australia, Adelaide. Stephen, A. 1993, Largely a Family Affair: Photography in the 1950 s, in The Australian Dream.
ed. O Callaghan, J. , Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, in Photography, the Image and Society Course Readings Semester One 1999, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
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