Reframing the family photograph - Part 1/4

by

Oddlaug Reiakvam

The popular practice of photography dates from the end of the nineteenth century, and using archive material from the pioneer phase as the empirical foundation, this distinctive mass phenomenon will be examined in the perspective of cultural analysis.

A further qualification of this phenomenon as a relevant topic for ethnological research is its quantitative as well as qualitative aspects. Products of private photographic practice are stored as huge moraines in public and private institutions, in libraries, archives and museums, or are kept in private homes in shoe boxes and albums, chest of drawers and in the attics as "family archives", and by virtue of their extent and distribution are an important, though in Norway unexploited, resource for research concerning popular cultural form. Traditionally, this visual heritage has been held in low esteem as source material, given a low rank on the aesthetic hierarchy this amateurism has been perceived as a trivial - though special - kind of personal activity. It should, rather, be considered as part of modernity, as a genuine folk art, produced and consumed universally.

The traditional way of utilizing this type of archive material has been basically fragmentary. Photographs are used selectively as illustrations subordinate to a written text, or as evidence and verification in cultural historical research. Thus the possibility of establishing a coherent way of examining an entire collection, to decipher it as a cumulative "text", is disregarded.

To test the narrative potential of this peculiar form of popular entertainment, some sampling will be carried out on a photographic collection dating from the turn of the century. The archive consists of 2000 glass negatives and four albums with approximately 1000 photographs, taken by a male member of the bourgeoisie from Bergen. (The second largest city in Norway, situated on the west coast.) He practiced photography from 1896 to circa 1920, during the new phase of amateur photography, when it turned into a mass phenomenon. This completely preserved collection will serve as a model to show how a "passively" stored archive can be recontextualized, and, in that way be activated as visual history and source material for research in this specific genre of popular communication. Because of the lack of supporting documentation and contextual information about the portrayed persons, these historical actors present themselves as "anchestors who ... have lost their descendants" (Hirsch), with no private context of memory and remembrance. With these limitations taken into consideration, the narrative potentiality might still be investigated on purely "objective" terms, and the collection brought into readability as a visualization of bourgeois family ideology in its specific historical setting, a substantial display of how a family chronicle is produced in a photographic laboratory throughout the establishing years for family photograph; an activity guided by stable and uniform pictorial conventions from its very beginning (Figure 1).

Photography is a slippery medium to catch hold of, and a brief digression may help to clarify some important aspects. It is essential to any interpretation of photographs that the relation between the image and what it represents be clarified in order to grasp the inherent dual capacity of the culturally constructed and naturally unconstructed image. In other words, a photograph is, at the same time, a technically conditioned picture of "reality" and a culturally conditioned pictorial reality. In spite of the "evidential force" of the photograph (Barthes, Camera), giving the impression of directly confronting reality, in the encounter with a photograph one should bear in mind that it is, nevertheless, a visual expression among other visual expressions, an interpretation of reality and, consequently, an inventor of its own reality. The message of this dual expression is moreover, in principle, ambiguous. The quick incision in the axis of time, that the photographic preservation of the second implies, creates discontinuity. The images are not responsible for "before" or "after" the constitutive moment of the photographic event. They are removed from the historical continuum and disconnected from time, while meaning is created as a process in time. Or as John Berger has phrased it: "When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future".

In approaching photography analytically, we find that it concerns neither a pictorial language with inherent semantic codes, nor technically conditioned, self-generated fragments of reality. Photography must be seen as:

... an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external

matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. That is, the meaning of any photographic message is necessarily context-determined."

(Sekula 85 )

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