Photographing Family by Aline Smithson

This weekend, we have a very special contribution put together by photographer/curator Aline Smithson. Thank you, Aline, for this wonderful feature.

Photographing Family
By Aline Smithson

I sent my youngest child off to college last month and my husband’s parents both died this year. These significant transitions have made me acutely appreciative of image makers that share the visual language of Photographing Family. The fleeting amount of time we have to remember the moment, to tell our stories, and create visual evidence, is very clear to me.

In most cases, the people who define our lives are usually living under our own roof, or sharing the dinner table at Thanksgiving. The practice of photographing family members is not a new one, but it’s appreciation at as an art form has never been greater. I recently heard from photographer Judy Gelles who has finally found an audience for her images of family, “I have been waiting for thirty years for my early work on bringing up my family to finally be recognized. For so long, mothering was a dirty word… no gallery wanted to look at the work. I had given up showing it to anyone.” Phillip Toledano shared with me that almost a million people have been to his site, Days with My Father, since it launched, and he’s received hundreds of emails from all over the world from people moved by the series. These images speak a universal language that connects us to our humanity.

I have gathered a talented group of photographers who have created meaningful projects about their families and asked them what it’s like to be a participant observer: to be a child or a parent, and at the same time, reveal something extremely personal through their art, often exposing and tarnishing an idealized concept of family. These images are not only about preserving memories, but about revealing truths. I was curious to understand their intentions and discover how they approached their work. I also asked if they would like to share any stories about a particular image, giving us a window into their thought process. Many thanks to Phillip Toledano, Doug DuBois, Elizabeth Flemming, Jack Radcliffe, David Newsom, Timothy Archibald, Tierney Gearon, and Dona Schwartz for sharing their insights and images.

Phillip Toledano’s series, Days with My Father, has struck a chord with everyone who sees it. I first learned about it from a non-photographer friend who was dealing with the decline of her own parents, and finding Phillip’s images were a comfort to her. Phillip began photographing his 98 year old father, shortly after his mother’s death, without consideration of the result. The result has been more than remarkable. Days with My Father will be published next year.

I never really felt like a photographer when i was taking pictures of my dad. I felt like someone drinking from the well for a last time, before setting out on a long journey alone… I just wanted to remember as much as possible, to see as much as I could, and to remember everything. It was very strange, spending time with someone I knew would die soon (we both knew, and where both waiting for it). Like most things I do in my life, there was very little consideration of my actions, rather just a reflexive urge that I HAD to do what I was doing.

Elizabeth Fleming’s series, Life is a Series of Small Moments, reminds me of work by great story tellers where inconsequential events layer to make a rich tapestry of a life lived. And it’s Elizabeth’s inconsequential moments that combine to create a real life, not a life photographed only on holidays, but a life of splendid forgettable moments that all add up to the feast of the ordinary. Her images take ordinary settings and infuses them with cinematic allegory and mystery. Elizabeth “looks for those synchronistic moments where she discovers the narrative thread contained in a single image, capturing chance circumstances as she seeks to raise the quotidian to a thing of wonder.”

My work in many ways centers on being a participant observer–I am both within the scene and standing apart as I photograph my daughters and our surroundings. Image-making is woven into our daily life, and this can be both beautiful and difficult. The beauty comes in feeling like I truly “see” my girls–that I am able to hold close those moments that are so fleeting as a way to connect with particular emotions and instants, and as a way to remember. The difficulty really comes later, as I try to process my work and am in my head. When I have to pull myself out of my mind in order to focus on the day-to-day of keeping up with two young children and all that being a stay-at-home mother entails it can be jarring. I suppose the conflict influences my images in a beneficial way–because it’s not a simple process it allows my work to go deeper than it might otherwise.

I was at a party with my family and in the back yard there was a rope swing. My older daughter Edie is very energetic and loves to climb and jump and sing loudly, and the rope to her was a new and fascinating method of going wild. Before the party she wanted to play dress-up and I let her put on some of my make-up, so if you look closely you can see the juvenile application of blush, lipstick and eyeshadow. In some ways I feel conflicted about letting her use my cosmetics- is it sending the “wrong” message, whatever that may be? I’ve had to recognize that she’s a child who needs to wear costumes and use her enormous imagination- I let her choose her own outfits, and pretty much have since she had the wherewithal to make decisions, and I think allowing her to explore with make-up is an extension of her creativity rather than an attempt at making herself “beautiful” or adult, as it were. The reason I want to explain this so fully is that I feel like this boundary was imbued in the picture–my desire to let my daughter be fully who she is coupled with the fear that she will pick up on those awful societal messages about what constitutes beauty. There is such an intensity to her expression, and I think this frame was chosen partly because of the transference of energy within my own intense feelings about how and when and if to guide her in navigating the world. Overall I love how unique she is, and I try my hardest to encourage and cherish her idiosyncrasies.

Doug Dubois‘ series and book, All the Days and Nights, has resonated with critics, collectors, and just about everyone else. This long term project consistently reveals the nuances and emotions of life at it’s most real. It’s been said that Doug can’t take a bad picture, and it’s also true that Doug has the ability to create an entire novel with just one image.

I have been photographing my family, on and off, for more than twenty years. It’s a small ensemble consisting almost exclusively of my parents, brother, sister and most recently, my nephew. The work began in 1984, the year before my father’s near fatal fall from a commuter train and my mother’s subsequent breakdown and hospitalizations for depression. Over the years, I have made a series of photographs, largely portraits, which chronicle the emotional demands and delicate forbearance of family life. During this time, my parents separated and subsequently ended their marriage of forty-two years, my sister divorced shortly after the birth of her son, and my brother began a life on his own in New York City.

The significance of these events, while critical to the motivation and context for creating the photographs, is not essential to their apprehension. The pallor of my mother’s skin, the glare of my father’s gaze and the tactile communion between my sister and nephew constitute a complex and resonant picture of family ties, the inevitability of aging, and the struggle to be at home with oneself. While I don’t appear in any of the photographs, my presence is held in the gaze of my family whenever they stare out at the camera; the repertoire of gestures, settings and poses reveal my hand as the photographer; and our emotional engagement speaks of a life together and my particular history with each.

My father and I share certain wrinkles. Genetics govern their imprint, but their presence delineates our age and experience. Twenty-five years ago, on a trip long since forgotten, my father and I shared a hotel room. In the morning, I photographed him packing his suits. Looking at the print now, I recognize three creases that line his neck and realize I am fast approaching his age at the time of the photograph.

The details of his flesh meant nothing to me then. I was interested in the play of morning sunlight against the bed and the wall. The correspondence between the three dots of reflected light and, if you look closely, the three water spots on my father’s shirtsleeve is one of those lucky accidents of photography that reveal themselves only later, like a clue imbedded in a novel, or in this particular instance, an ellipsis marking time between that morning and now, his body and mine.

David Newsom has two projects that are about family. The first, Skip, was published by Perceval Press, and revolves around his brother, Lloyd, who struggles with a mental disability. David’s second on-going project chronicles his father’s descent into alzheimer’s disease.

Shooting my brother, who is in constant motion, was my way of “seeing” him in his new landscape. I was fascinated by the sight of him making his way in this new landscape- literally and socially- and shooting it was just my way into that world.

These images present two sides of the story of my brother’s life. The image of him leaning against the truck sums up, in my mind, the solitude that surrounds someone with a learning disability. While we make endless efforts to find a way for them to “fit in”, that effort alone reveals that they’re forever on the outside of something. This tension is ever-present. The second image- of my sister Ginny Newsom, cutting his toenails, tells the other side of the story- that though those with mental disability are, by the very nature of their illness somehow apart from the mainstream, they are almost always tended to by those who remain largely in the shadows. Caregivers- in this case my sister, my brother Jeffrey and his wife Jane and the employees of the group home where Skip lives- are never the subject of movies or books, but they are a constant presence in the lives of those with disabilities. People suffering mental disabilities may exist in a kind of solitude but they are rarely alone, unless they’ve been abandoned to the streets.

The first pictures I took were of my father and Jean sitting around the pool of the abandoned community they winter(ed) in in Vero Beach. My dad was deeply depressed, barely able to function, but he was also gravely present. Up until this time, my father had always had a sort of jaunty persona, a “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” ethos that may have served him, but left little room for the complicated effects of having had an abusive father, having lived through a brutal war and having ridden out two or three marriages. My dad was revealing himself through his cracks and in this, a sort of “grace” was descending, showing all of us to each other. It was that sensation of grace that compelled me to shoot as much of the story as I could, to record it, because it felt- and still feels-like history in the making, like a war that was finally coming home, bringing out the best, scariest and most human in all of us.

In May of this year, after years of attempting to hold not just his own but the life of his common-law wife, Jean Baker, together, my dad collapsed. Jean, it turns out, has been declining from the cruel effects of Alzheimer’s, and both they and everyone around them- myself included- had participated in a grand concert of denial which allowed them to go on until they were both incapable of conducting their own lives. By the time my sister and I arrived to help them make their annual move north from Florida to New Jersey in early May, their world had come apart. Jean was wandering their tiny condo in Vero Beach, by turns curious and confused, forgetting moments as fast as she had them and seeing people and things in the room none of us could. My father, a WWII hero and voice from a more stoic generation, was simultaneously exhausted and sleepless, a fidgeting, unfocused man in unkempt clothes, poring over paperwork at all hours, unable to dial the phone, waking at all hours in terror that he “had nothing”.

The minute we stepped in to help out, he simply caved in upon himself. What ensued was largely a nightmare, as four family members were suddenly plunged into the abyss of not one but two people’s mental illness. But for all the obvious drama, what moved me most was the deep intimacy and “grace” that revealed itself to us. Harrowing nights spent “living through” dad’s horrific flashbacks of deadly battles in France were also journey’s into the psyche and life of a man my sister and I realized we really didn’t know at all. The intense focus of caring yields many unforeseen things, not the least of which is a richer, deeper state of being, an acute awareness of being alive that felt oddly similar to the kind of feeling our father talked about feeling in battle.

Timothy Archibald’s Echolilia Project is a collablorative project with his son Elijah. The series is enhanced by utilizing scanned objects created or found by Elijah. When combined with Timothy’s images, the juxtaposition creates sophisticated and complex observations, that are at once modern, yet are exceedingly personal.

If your subject is your kid, access is rarely the problem- everything you need is right in front of you. Being the Dad and then trying to let go of that role and then try to collaborate with my son… oh that is the problem. What will I do to get the photograph? What license will I give him? What line will I cross myself to make the image happen, only to then switch over and be the Dad moments later when the shoot is over?

Here we are re-creating an accident together. Here we are wrapping him in rubber bands….something he did already but this time in just the right light. Is he consenting to this stuff? I showed this work to a friend who responded “ Photographers always claim to be collaborating with their subjects. The truth is we are willing to do anything to get what we want from them. We’ll steal what we can as quickly as we can or pay any price after that if the stealing doesn’t work. You know that is true.” I didn’t disagree.

But with Echolilia, I feel my son is a co-conspirator- he knows we need to make these images.

Jack Radcliffe’s series about his daughter, Alison has been a significant commitment. He has photographed her since birth, chronicling intimate moments that give us a front row seat to his daughter’s journey into adulthood. It’s a rare opportunity to to not only witness her development, but Jack’s perceptive and insightful approach to his imagery.

I have been making portraits of family, friends and acquaintances for the past 35 years. Early in my career, I discovered that the meaning of a single exposure, when it is part of a collection of moments, becomes only one element of an evolving story. Since the addition of a new portrait changes the meaning of the entire sequence, each image is no longer static. In every succeeding photograph, the subject and I are older, our circumstances have changed, and our relationship has deepened or dissolved. All of these forces are reflected in my photographs.

My photographing style developed from working with my daughter, Alison. The “Alison Series” began as a father/daughter activity. I thought of the project as a gift for my daughter, and it wasn’t until I had photographed her for fifteen years that I considered exhibiting the body of work.

Alison was my first collaborator, and she felt free to participate in any photographic decision. Our sessions were short, casual, and frequent. I would occasionally leave the lights set up in our home to take advantage of special occasions. Crucial to the project was my desire to make photographs of Alison that depicted her life without my intervention. If she had a friend who annoyed me, or had a romance with someone I disliked, I still documented the moment. When I caught her smoking, I was very upset (this was particularly difficult, because her mother and I were former smokers who had struggled mightily to quit). Rightly or wrongly, I made the decision to include the ever-present cigarette and cup of coffee in the series. (These situations highlighted the difficult issue for me of parental disapproval and intervention vs. my desire to objectively and artistically document the everyday “in-between” moments of her life over time. Happily,
Alison today is a non-smoker, as well as a musician and artist, who lives in Virginia with her husband and enjoys excellent relationships with her parents.)

What began as a simple father/daughter fun activity of “making images”, eventually blossomed into a years-long wholly collaborative effort resulting in seven three-inch binders packed with negatives of Alison. They are a catalog of my memories. When she was a child I think of that Halloween she dressed up like her interpretation of a ballerina. As she grew older and declared her independence, I think of “Driving Lessons, Columbia, Maryland, 1990”, or the image of her writing poetry with a friend in a local café (“Alison and Bean, Daily Grind Café, Baltimore, Maryland, 1992“). It was through my work with Alison in the early years, that I gradually came to a career decision that was pivotal: I decided that what was most important to me was to photograph my subjects over an extended period of time. I began using a 50mm wide-angle lens for my Hasselblad camera, which afforded me the opportunity to get as close as 12 inches to my subject,
thereby creating an atmosphere of intimacy in the image.

In 2001, Tierney Gearon’s controversial exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery began a dialogue about perception. Tierney’s authentic and ingenuous images of her children, and more recently, her mother, have set the bar for unflinchingly veracious truth telling. In addition to her own work, the documentary: Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project, revealed Tierney’s ability to be a remarkable participant observer. Tierney has been traveling and lecturing and the following quotes have been collected from previous interviews.

My pictures are about a captured moment, rather than about the person. They are about a feeling, and to that extent they preserve my children’s anonymity. They are disguised somehow. I’m showing a moment of life, not part of their personality, and to that extent they could be anyone.

All these photos are portraits of myself.

Dona Schwartz, explores her family from a unique perspective. In the Kitchen, a collection of several years of culinary and familial observations, has recently been published by Kehrer Verlag. Dona’s series explores a blended family, with images focusing on multi-generational issues, all shot in her very active kitchen. Her images reveal universal dramas, simple truths, and poignant moments.

In my work photography is a natural extension of participant observation. I am a student of social situations and I attentively observe activities and events that unfold in my midst. My photographs are like field notes that abstract moments from ongoing space and time, rendering them available for scrutiny. I return to my “notes” again and again, to mine them for meaning, to discover new inferences, and to re-experience the revelations embedded in their surface.

When I shot the photographs for “In the Kitchen” I wore two hats; I was simultaneously mom and photographic chronicler of my blended family’s daily life. With practice (and determination) I was able to seamlessly move from flipping pancakes to framing images. It helped that there were lots of people around, and that they found one another much more interesting and entertaining than my camera and me. I had persistence on my side and, most importantly, my family’s trust. My recipe combined these essential ingredients: flexibility, perseverance, perspicacity, our own special blend of spice, and love.

Donald Antrim’s (excerpted) essay in Doug DuBois’ book, All the Days and Nights, sums up the parallels between photographing one’s family and the risks of the literary memoir. It’s worth reading.

Memoir can be a treacherous preoccupation. The memoirist, in the course of thinking about people and the relationships between them—in the course of producing stories made from the relationships between people—risks disturbing the structures that hold relationships in place. Family histories and family members are forever vulnerable to the compromising effects of the memoirist’s ambition, which is to order and present a set of sometimes private and sometimes communal experiences along lines that are explicitly neither private nor communal. The memoirist is in service to his or her own vision or idea, after all, and a memoir’s versions of people and affairs are therefore to be taken by a reader or a viewer as not only observant and considered but, finally, as authorial in nature, which is to say personally subjective and singular, not necessarily shared by the memoirist’s willing or unwilling subjects, the people whose separate stories remain central to the seemingly unilaterally conceived one story suggested by memoir considered as a creative and artistic act. And there is this: the memoirist plans to publish. Matters of vanity and shame become pressing, both to the author and the living family members (and friends and assorted other players), who, marshaled together in the larger service of Memoir, with its avowed search for something like truth or beauty, become, to a very real degree, a cast of characters. It is one thing to studiously imagine into being, to make real, as it were, in words or images, a person either long dead or never born, a figure from history, perhaps, or a character in fiction. It is quite another problem to bring into existence the mother or father, the brother or sister, standing before you in, for want of a better way of putting it, the bright and clear light of day…

Aline Smithson recently curated Fathers and Sons for Fraction Magazine.

After a career as a New York Fashion Editor and working along side the greats of fashion photography, Aline Smithson discovered the family Rolleiflex and never looked back. Now represented by galleries across the country and published throughout the world, Aline continues to create her award-winning photography with humor, compassion, and a 50-year-old camera. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Eyemazing, Artworks, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines. She has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Oswald Gallery, and Wallspace Gallery in Seattle. Aline has been the Gallery Editor for Light Leaks Magazine, writes and edits the blog, Lenscratch, and has been curating exhibitions for a number of galleries and on-line magazines. She was nominated for The Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award in 2008 and 2009 and for the Santa Fe Prize in Photography in 2009 by the Santa Fe Center of Photography.