Description
As a distinctive category of amateur practice, family photographs are one of the most popular and ubiquitous visual images produced as part of the fabric of everyday life. They are created, circulated and archived, often depicting personal memories of holidays, family events, anniversaries and birthdays. Due to their vernacular nature, family pictures are often considered banal and ordinary, but they also tell stories. As this paper argues, they are visual narratives that can reveal and simultaneously conceal societal, cultural and political issues in a global context but from a personal perspective. In doing so, they disrupt grand narratives of global relations by focusing on the specific, the quotidian and the eccentric, whilst creating ideas of belonging, cultural memory and social relations.Drawing on the photographic family archive of three generations of amateur photographers from Romania, covering the interwar, communist and post-communist transition period of the 1990s, this paper positions the family photography archive not only as an alternative archive of the personal experience but also as an archive through which we can begin to comprehend the everyday life experience as it was then. The photos become a portal into another world. Considering the family archive as a site of knowledge production and photography as a catalyst for memory and storytelling, where social power is negotiated, contested and confirmed, this paper investigates the practices, silences and ideologies of this particular family archive and how it constructed a narrative of the country’s historical past, thereby functioning as the foundation of historical imagination and understanding.
At a time when the future is widely advertised as digital and visual, we need to re-evaluate the function and uses of the family archive’s material world and its role in constructing cultural, collective and vernacular memories and narratives.
| Period | 10 Jun 2025 |
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| Held at | Royal Historical Society , United Kingdom |