The Family Album

"Any attempt to gaze into the crystal ball will be obscured by the sheer number of images being taken. In 1998, 67-billion images were made worldwide. We know that because three billion rolls of film were sold. It is impossible to be accurate, but with a world population of digital cameras exceeding a third of a billion on top of millions of film-using cameras still in use, it is likely that more pictures are taken every year than in the previous 160 years of photography put together."

Tom Ang. Snap, Shut, Shutter. Guardian Online 02 January 2006

We all have one. Probably several. It might be a perfectly mounted, tissue-leaved, embossed, padded and gilt-edged affair, or maybe one of those self-adhesive albums with layers of sticky film clouding the photographs. Perhaps it takes the form of a series of flip-books, each containing several dozen blurred and badly composed 6x4 shots taken on holiday in Tunisia. More likely, the bulk of the collection stagnates in the processors' envelopes inside a large cardboard box which is ripped at the seams and in danger of imminent collapse. It is even quite possible, in this day and age, that our precious collection has migrated from any of the above forms and taken up life in cyberspace as an online collection - a virtual album, if you will.

Whatever the format, it seems almost certain that we have a collection of images which are at once deeply personal and yet intended for sharing (possibly ad nauseam) with anyone who indicates the slightest interest.

The photographs we gather to our collective bosom will be a mixture of studio portraits, home-staged groupshots and, most commonly, informal snapshots taken as and when the occasion arises with little regard for composition or indeed any manner of good practice.

'Twas ever thus, but for the fact that in the early days of photography, only the rich could afford the luxury and then it was left to the expert hands of the professional portrait studio to deliver the goods.

Exploring the Family Album as a genre is fascinating and well documented; it is, after all, the most common form or photographic practice and has touched the lives of all but the most isolated and disenfranchised. It is possible to see countless examples of family albums on the web - just Google for "photograph family album" to see what I mean. They all, regardless of the period of history in which they were taken, focus on the personal, on those things or people which are of direct and concrete relevance to the photographer. This changes according to the time, of course, but there are few family albums in the history of the medium which do not contain photographs of children, pets, houses, weddings, holidays and the never-ending convolution of relatives.

Nancy Martha West¹ likes to think of the family snapshot as “an obligatory act of preserving memories as defence against the future and as assurance of the past” The construction of memory is aided by photographs – a photograph is a picture of the past. Miles Orvell² remind us, however: "“Yet given the nature of the camera as a mediating instrument, the photographic image is not quite the clear window into the self or into the past that one might naively assume it to be.” (p144) This suggests that, however faithfully we record our friends and families in photographs, we are only ever preserving a particular version of the past, not the past itself.

The ease with which anybody can create and maintain a web presence has made the online family album commonplace. Many people are scanning there paper-based collections and uploading them, more still are shooting directly onto digital media and bypassing the conventional album altogether. In this example, Mark Horrell has scanned his mother's photograph collection and built his own online version. The intimate family album has become common property - to be viewed by the whole world should it feel so inclined. How does this affect the status of the album? Does it become more, or less important/precious/familial? Do we, as casual observers, become part of an extended family for the purposes of viewing, or are we merely voyeurs, intruding into someone else's life? So, perhaps by putting the family archives onto the web, we are abandoning all attempts at intimacy and must therefore expect and even enjoy the gaze of a wider, incalculably huge (and largely unknown) audience.

What sort of person puts his or her family photographs online? Is it a form of exhibitionism? ('Look at my children/dogs/car/choice of holiday venues, aren't they just wonderful?') Perhaps it gives a sense of self-worth, or is it just a genuine desire to share with a disparate family those images which would otherwise remain unseen by the relatives in the far-flung corners of the globe?

There will be many, perhaps the majority, who believe that the family album webpages will only ever be seen by those who have a direct interest, that is to say, other members of the extended family. This is largely true, of course: not many people spend their evenings voluntarily trawling through other people's baby pictures; but there is much to be learned from the study of other people's choice of memorable data.

Forward to page two

References

¹West, NM. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia 2000.

²Orvell, M. American Photography (Oxford History of Art) OUP 2003.

URLs

All sites accessed and working 16/03/06

Tom Ang, Mail & Guardian Online