July 14, 2022
Years ago, when I worked as a photographer doing mostly portraits, a gracious and vivacious Virginian named Sally commissioned a portrait of herself, her three beautiful adult daughters, and her new son-in-law, a pleasant young businessman named Ted. When we met for our session, the weather was dull, and the mood in the room was subdued. Ted stood in the middle, flanked by his new wife and mother-in-law, smiling confidently. But then Leslie, the sardonic middle daughter, noted that the arrangement was wrong: What if Louise and Ted divorced? Shouldn’t he stand to the side, in case he needed to be airbrushed out? The ladies were amused, and the mood brightened. Leslie riffed on the vagaries of her own relationships, and the topic turned to the sisters’ former paramours and who among those rejected men was or was not portrait-worthy. Soon, they were imagining all the things Ted might do that could get him kicked to the curb. You know what it’s like, when everybody just can’t stop laughing.
Ted laughed manfully along with them for a while—but the more scenarios they invented for his future departure, the less sincere his smile became. On my contact sheets, successive frames revealed the progression. Eventually, the women actually put Ted in the back and to the side; in the last shot of the session, they are grinning hugely, faces flushed, eyes wide and sparkling, while he stands apart, looking crestfallen. Recalling that portrait session makes me laugh to this day. (I’m happy to report that the marriage endured; the couple now have grandchildren, and Ted is still “in the picture.”)
Portraits of more than one person imply relationships, and so the meanings of our family pictures shift as families age, change, and regenerate. Recently, I came across a portrait of one of my cousins, made when she was young. It was taken long ago, at a lake house that was in our family for a century but isn’t anymore. A much beloved but long-gone dog is sitting at her feet. Kneeling by the pair, however, is her ex-husband, and, as a result, my cousin hasn’t used or shared the picture in years. But she’s a diehard fan of the singer Barry Manilow, and I’m proficient in Photoshop. So I found a picture of Manilow as a young man, in which the lighting matched the portrait’s, and grafted his face over the ex-husband’s. My cousin loved it, and shared it with everyone she knew. Problem solved.
The practice of family photography is vast and sprawling, and there’s no one way to approach any aspect of it. I’ve worked in photography in many different capacities for four decades, interacting with many thousands of photographers, of all skill levels, but I’m still surprised by how people find inventive ways of making something original and personal. Creating a comprehensive record of a family’s life is inherently challenging—it’s an extended, ambitious, and multifaceted documentary project—and yet there are always new routes to meeting those challenges.
HONORING OLD PHOTOS
One challenge we all face is navigating the division between past and present. A natural first impulse is to divide the recent from the historical—to distinguish between an Instagram post made yesterday, for instance, and a platinum print of a bearded old man from 1910. But the distinction isn’t always so straightforward. With every passing day, recent pictures gradually become historical.
The South African photographer Lebohang Kganye came up with an ingenious way to acknowledge this process. After her mother’s death, Kganye found old snapshots of her mother in her prime; in a closet, she also found many of her mother’s memorable outfits. So Kganye photographed herself dressed as her mother, and digitally added her image to the old pictures. The result is haunting—it’s the deceased mother who appears more solid and present, and the living daughter who looks ghostly and transparent. Ordinarily, we honor our historical family pictures by curating them, perhaps in multi-picture frames, albums, or books. But it’s also possible to make new art works out of old pictures, as Kganye has done—honoring the memory of her mother while breathing new life into photos of her.
DOCUMENTING
Family photography comes in many forms, but much of it is documentary—it records everyday life in ordinary places. This photograph of the Zahler family was made in 1941 by Jack Delano, who worked for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal government agency charged with fighting poverty. The father of the family, Gottlieb Zahler, isn’t pictured; the four people on the left are siblings, and the woman on the right is their mother, Ida, then in her late forties.
Ida and Gottlieb emigrated from Lenk, Switzerland, on the eve of the First World War. Donald, the handsome boy with the hat who is sitting on the couch, is pictured near the end of his life—he enlisted while still underage, became the tail gunner on an Eighth Air Force B-17, and died when his plane was shot down over Germany.
It’s often said that good photographs should “stand alone” and “speak for themselves.” But this isn’t always true, and, in fact, the truth is more like the opposite. Most photographs you come across have stories—you just don’t know them. I actually believe that the more that’s known about what a photograph shows, the more likely it is to survive. Don’t be shy about trying to record what you know about a picture, and about finding some way of keeping the picture together with its story.
DIFFICULT SUBJECTS
All photographers encounter a variety of impediments and difficulties in their work; it’s part of the game. Family photography is no exception. Inevitably, there will be someone who always turns away or covers her face, someone who thinks that it’s hilarious to photobomb your shot by giving the camera the finger, and so on. I have no idea how evolution could have programmed humans with an instinctual response to a technology that didn’t exist until 1839, but it’s also observable that certain children are driven to make faces at the camera between the ages of, say, five and eight. The behavior seems to emerge on schedule, like any other developmental phase.
My son was twelve or thirteen when he announced that he didn’t want me to take his picture anymore. Kids are people, too, and their feelings and wishes should be respected and considered; I’ve also learned that I like having permission when I photograph. So I talked with him and made a proposal. Photography is my thing, I said, and I wanted a record of what he looked like; would he agree to coöperate with me for three minutes, five times a year? Just fifteen minutes—it was too reasonable for him to refuse. I was strict with myself about never taking his picture spontaneously, but when I really wanted a photograph I’d ask for my three minutes and make a quick portrait. I now have at least one nice picture of him from each of his teen-age years.
It’s ironic that young people don’t want their picture taken. Many older people don’t like pictures of themselves because they wish they looked younger. I had an aunt who disliked my pictures of her. “You always make me look bad!” she’d complain, casually slandering my skills. One summer, when I got a nice picture of her smiling at the end of a dock, I knew that she’d think she looked old, so I simply put it away and waited five years before I showed it to her. When she finally saw it, she was pleased. “I look really good in this!” she said. I’d made her look five years younger.
STORIES IN ONE FRAME
Experienced photographers are always looking for ways to tell a story by implying what might have come before a photo and what might come after. And this is often how we look at photos, at least subconsciously—we invent the before and after for ourselves. In Sally Mann’s picture “Jessie Bites,” from her book Immediate Family, we see a small girl with a marvellously flinty expression. Clues suggest that she might’ve been trapped indoors with little to do; perhaps it was a rainy day. Her body’s been decorated, and her hair might have been done, but those distractions haven’t lasted. Now she’s bored and cross, on the verge of a nap or a meltdown. On the arm of the adult lying next to her are tooth marks—the visual expression of her mood. We’re seeing only a little moment in a bigger story we’ll never know. But we know what just happened.
ACQUIRING TECHNIQUE
Technique is something many people would rather not think about. Cameras are so automated now that we often don’t have to—until we do. Black people sometimes point out that cameras don’t flatter them, and they are right. Lighting situations that might be problematic for white faces—glancing sunlight with harsh shadows, silhouetting, tepid indoor lighting like you might find in a high-school gym—can be even more so for Black faces. Skin tone and color are arranged on a spectrum: the Monk Skin Tone Scale, developed by Ellis Monk, a sociologist at Harvard who studies colorism and artificial intelligence, employs ten bars, none of which is black or white. It’s important to be sensitive to the distinctiveness of skin tone, because getting the visual feeling of it right respects a person’s individuality.
Skilled photographers have been making superb pictures of Black people for many decades—just look at the work of the great jazz photographers of the nineteen-fifties. Today, digital photography makes exposure much easier. Good light, which you can learn to recognize, helps a lot; later, onscreen, you can adjust your pictures until the tones look right. You can work at calibrating your eye and your judgment. On your computer or on paper, you might collect images in which the faces of people of color are well rendered, and then keep those examples in mind as you’re shooting, editing, or evaluating your own work.
It’s worth learning whatever techniques you need. As Rashod Taylor’s lovely, touching, and formally ravishing self-portrait with his sleeping son shows, if you get the lighting and exposure right, the tones will sing.
COLLECTING
It might sound odd, but some people collect pictures of other peoples’ families. Collectors of “found objects” or “vernacular photography” gather old photos from all sorts of sources—flea markets, yard sales, antique stores, eBay, estate sales. People have collected everything from cast-off Kodachrome slides to nineteenth-century cartes de visite. It can be an opportunity to exercise your delectation without spending a fortune, and some of the finds are beautiful and unique. (And sometimes weird, hilarious, or surreal.)
In my opinion, the high-water mark of portraiture for hire—as opposed to fine-art portraits by auteurs—came in the decades before the First World War, roughly 1895-1915. Photographers vied to find lenses with just the right balance of sharpness and softness, and made exquisite little contact prints, often cut into an oval shape, on commercial platinum papers. But the Great War interrupted the global supply of platinum, which was restricted for nonmilitary purposes, and afterward the fashion never resumed. You can still find these forgotten gems, hiding here and there, if you hunt for them.
ACCESS
A few years ago, a friend of mine turned his phone to me and said, “Look at this.” The picture showed his twin toddler grandsons, in their diapers, raiding the refrigerator after hours.
Professional photographers know that access to subject matter is crucial, and they work hard to obtain it. Danny Lyon embedded himself in the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club to create “The Bikeriders,” his influential documentary project, in 1968; Mary Ellen Mark, along with the writer Karen Folger Jacobs, lived in a mental institution for dangerous inmates while working on the book “Ward 81.” The set of photographs taken on the moon by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong must be the ultimate example of the value of access.
To take pictures from the lunar surface, you’ve got to be on the lunar surface. And, by the same token, no hired photographer, no matter how good, could have made my friend’s picture of those toddler twins climbing Mt. Refrigerator. No professional would have been there when it happened. You have better access to your own family than anyone else does, and, for a photographer, that’s an advantage and a privilege.
In part, your special access means that you can photograph moments that are visible only to insiders. But it has other implications. Many years ago, I visited Mann at her house on the Maury River, and she asked me if I wanted to see the evolution of her picture “The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude.” (There are actually two different pictures in existence under the same title.) She pulled out an old film box filled with eight-by-ten proofs and spread them out on the floor. She had dragged Emmett, her son, to the same location time after time, but she couldn’t seem to find the picture that she knew was there—the successive attempts showed her groping toward what she wanted, trying ideas and rejecting them. Her last attempt was late in the fall, and it was cold, and Emmett was bored, and he told her that he didn’t want to do it anymore—hence the picture’s title. Because of your access to your family, you can keep trying to get a particular picture until you succeed.
EDITING GOALS
Let’s say a family of four is going on a weeklong vacation to Hawaii. One of the adults is taking a good-quality dedicated camera, and everyone else will be snapping away with their smartphones. How many pictures should the family aim to end up with?
Consider the possibility that a reasonable number is eight. Why so few? Because life is full, and pictures accrue. The events of life come tumbling along, and the photos pile up, like the days and the hours do. The more family pictures you amass over time without editing or “organizing” them—without keywording, without making the hard decisions about which are the best and most essential—the more chaotic, dispiriting, disorganized, unlabelled, unsearchable, and jumbled the great mass will be, and the less well any given one of them will function for its purpose. Surfeit adds up to failure; selectivity leads to success.
This isn’t to say that you should take only a few pictures. On the contrary, an open secret of photography is that good photographers shoot more and show less. You might have to take five hundred pictures in Hawaii to get eight truly good ones—and, even then, getting those eight good ones won’t be easy. You can’t just shoot indiscriminately—pursuing the strategy photographers call “spray and pray”—and get what you want. You’ll have to be purposeful as you collect the raw material for your later edit. This requires being alert to opportunities and sensitive to what family members will really want to remember. You also have to be perceptive about what makes your experience distinctive. Mindless snapping of “the sights” isn’t going to hack it. Dozens of images of marine life beneath a glass-bottomed boat won’t make up for missing the zip line that was the highlight of your ten-year-old’s trip.
The same principle applies when you’re not on vacation. It’s tempting to take—and keep—many photos of birthday parties, picnics, athletic competitions, and so on. But numerous events can be commemorated with a single picture. It just has to be a good one, and to tell enough of the story.
WHAT MAKES A FAMILY PICTURE?
These portraits were taken in 1846 or ’47, less than a decade after the invention of photography was announced to the world. The one on the left shows a young American frontier lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, who’s just been elected to Congress; the companion picture of Mary Todd Lincoln was taken at the same time.
To us, the photographs seem like dry, distant, and stiff historical artifacts. They belong in a museum. But here’s what Mary said of these pictures: “They are very precious to me, taken when we were young and so desperately in love.”
Changes things, doesn’t it? Mary’s feelings are what transform these from artifacts into family pictures.
IRREPLACEABLE TREASURES
“Schindler’s List” came out in 1993; I saw it in a theatre with a married couple, Stan and Teresa Noyszewski, then of Oak Park, Illinois. They were Polish Catholics who’d been victims of the Nazis as children; Teresa spent several of her early years in a camp. After the movie ended, as we were walking up the aisle, Teresa said, “That’s the same kind of camp they had us in.” I asked if the filmmakers had got the portrayal right. She said that the film was accurate, but “compressed”; it had jammed the episodes of horror together, eliding the long periods of boredom in between. Teresa is normally a warm, joyful person, mild, friendly, and loving, but in the aisle in the still-darkened theatre her voice was hard and cold. When we emerged into the light of the lobby, I saw that there were tears streaming down her cheeks.
Some time later, Teresa asked me if I could make copies of some pictures for her. She gave me two small black-and-white photographs, dating from the nineteen-thirties, of her parents, Bronisław and Maria Myszkowski. They were basic head-and-shoulders portraits taken for identification purposes—the equivalent of driver’s-license pictures. Maria survived the war, and Teresa has a few other photographs of her. But her father and brother died of typhus while the family was hiding with a group of resistance fighters in the forests of Poland, and she has no memory of her father—she was very young when he died. The little I.D. picture is the only trace of him that survives, and all she knows of what he looked like.
As I worked on the copy photographs, I got a taste of how the conservators at the Library of Congress must feel when they handle rare and irreplaceable paper treasures. I was extremely careful with the old I.D. photos for every moment they were in my possession.
PORTRAITS
The most basic, necessary, and potentially beautiful kind of family picture is the portrait—casual or formal, individual or group. It used to be understood that certain occasions in life were worthy of commemorative portraiture: a new baby’s first “good” portrait, perhaps displayed at a christening, then the Christmas-card portrait, the graduation portrait, the wedding book. These days, portraits—especially self-portraits—are easier to make than ever before. Paradoxically, we seem increasingly uninterested in making formal portraits on special occasions.
I think that it makes sense to have occasions for portraits, although we can all decide for ourselves what those might be. An engagement presents a good opportunity. The couple are usually in the prime of their lives, feeling great about themselves and their futures—and yet it’s not the Big Day, with all its stresses, so they can be informal and relaxed. The last day of school each year is another possibility—I came up with that idea after taking first-day-of-school portraits of my son for several years, in which he often looked glum and worried.
In this recent phone-selfie engagement portrait, sent out to friends and relatives by Mattie and Lillian (I’ve known Lillian since she was a baby), you can see Lillian’s ring. Here’s something to consider about this picture: Americans habitually present themselves to the world with big smiles, for which Europeans sometimes make fun of us. But we can forget that, beyond the smiles we put on and take off at will, there are genuine smiles that are sincere and natural expressions of inner happiness and pleasure. That’s what makes this photograph special.
EXTENDING DEFINITIONS
The photographer Jamel Shabazz is currently having a retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. (It ends on September 4th.) “It was very important for me to have those handshakes, those hugs, to show that love and that unity,” he told the Guardian, of the moments captured in his photos. We use the word “family” both broadly and flexibly; we can create any definition of family that we wish to. A recovery program, classmates, a team, others who have similar interests or enthusiasms—the other day, I read about a “family” of friends who have been playing fantasy sports together for decades. Or people of your ethnicity, or from your community, or who share your sexual orientation; people who have in common a specific affliction or life experience—any of those and many more can be thought of as family. Sometimes friends are closer than relatives.
Choose your family, and the possibilities for photographic projects open up. I’ve heard of a twin who did a photo project on twins, and someone who photographed all the surviving members of his high-school class from more than half a century earlier. There’s no need to be constrained by formal or traditional definitions if you’d rather not be. Anything that brings people together and bonds them as a group could work.
People have a tendency to be modest and self-deprecating when talking about or sharing their family pictures. “It’s just a family snapshot,” they might say. “I know it’s nothing special.” Family pictures are modest, they’re not often slick and polished, and their specialness to us can be opaque to strangers. But there’s no reason not to take them seriously. The only thing wrong with them is that their audience is small. They’re a record of our passage through our lives, a visual diary. And, within their narrow range, they make up in depth what they lack in broad appeal. They’re a way of honoring these lives we get to lead on this earth, an attempt at fixing in time, and holding on to, people we loved and who loved us. Collectively, over time, they express feelings that no other kinds of photograph can. They express our gratitude.
So there’s nothing wrong with lavishing care, time, love, effort, skill, persistence, intention, and enthusiasm on our family archives. Find ways to photograph whatever is closest to your heart. What better subject is there, in the end?
Any kind of photograph can be a family picture, too, not just those which appear at first glance to fit the genre. In 1913, my great-grandfather built a large, beautiful cottage on the shores of a northern Michigan lake. This is the chair in the dining room from which my grandmother presided over lively, crowded family dinners every evening of every summer of my childhood. But not only that—it was her mother’s chair for many decades before it was hers, and, after my grandmother died, it became my mother’s.
Altogether, our family was in that big house on the shore for a hundred summers. Small wonder that this picture makes me smile when I pass it in the hallway and think to look up. With family pictures, it’s what they mean that counts. ♦
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