What is the most important ingredient in family photographs?
Is it the expressions? Or the relationships depicted between the subjects? Or the time and occasion of the portrait being taken? All these things are important but most important is our memory of the family, the people, who they are and the viewers relationship to them and the occasion and time when it was taken.
“Perhaps we have to loose our memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing. We no longer live an identity. Memory has become the means by which we possess identity. One of the most precious things we have in a marriage, in a family, in a friendship, is a shared collective memory. As soon as photographs show us the world we think we know, it instantly becomes the world we remember. We see what we remember through the photograph, but we also discover those things we have forgotten. The photograph becomes the site of such identification. It remains the cursor on our understanding of what it means to remember that I am who I have been.” Les Walkling 1992
Consider the thoughts of a child seeing themselves in the family portrait, perhaps remembering it being taken, seeing themselves as part of a family, building up that confidence and growing identity by joining the past to the present. “Family isn't about whose blood you have. It's about who you care about." Trey Parker and Matt Stone
The family is one of the most rewarding of subjects to photograph. Capturing the family dynamics and good expressions is challenging and great fun.
Next Steps:
