I read an interesting extract from “Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography”. It talks about Larry Sultan’s ‘Pictures from Home’ project and the challenges of photographing your own parents. “What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than with sociology. With being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of working, everything shifts: the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up on the middle of the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows.”
Photographing family can be a difficult subject to document. It means different things to different people. In Leonie Hampton’s ‘In the Shadow of Things’, her documentation of her mum lead her to take a step back and understand the topic differently. For Sultan he talks about a conversation with his mum where she didn’t like the photo so much that she told people it wasn’t him that took it.
Photographers that work with their family cannot avoid being included. Emma Hardy documented her family as they grow up. As a viewer you almost feel part of the journey as the children grow up and move out. The images reflect the emotional state of Hardy herself. I recently looked into the relationship between photographer and subject, in the family photos there is normally a strong personal connection. We begin to understand the relationship, especially through projects such as Hardy’s where it is across a long time scale. “There is a different psychological charge to the pictures I’ve made with her compared to our relationship without a camera between us.”
Photographers who have approached the theme of family have said you have to be sensitive about what you release into the world and how it can affect the subject. Although your family are likely to let you in on their more private emotions and moods, you have to be respectful.
In conclusion, family is a challenging topic to document. You have to see things from a distance but still be able to portray emotions. It’s interesting that even just documenting everyday life with your family over time can become a story of relationship changes. When photographing the people I live with I need to keep in mind the complexity behind it and not just the technical parts.
Lucy Davis 