Description
Family photographs are a hugely popular pastime, yet due to the vernacular nature of family snapshots, this extensive photographic practice is often considered banal and ordinary, carried out as part of the fabric of everyday life. However, family photographs are more than just personal memories of birthdays, friendships and special family events with a certain mobility attached to them, since the pictures travel between family members and position them in relation to one another and to the ‘familial gaze’. As this paper will argue, family photographs are visual narratives and social positions that document societal, cultural and political issues in a global context 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 identity and social relations.Drawing on the photographic family archive of three generations of amateur photographers from Romania, with the family photographs covering the inter-war, communist and post-communist transition period of the 1990s, this paper discusses photographic image-making as a vernacular practice of resistance and survival in the context of different political times and events that were experienced by three amateur photographers and their respective generations. Considering the family archive as a site of knowledge production and a catalyst for memory where social power is negotiated, contested and confirmed, this paper will further investigate 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 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 archives’ material world and its role in constructing cultural, collective and vernacular memories and narratives.
| Period | 3 Apr 2025 → 6 Apr 2025 |
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