Oddlaug Reiakvam
Drawing on scholars from different disciplines, such as Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger, Richard Chalfen and Allan Sekula, the decisive theoretical inspiration for the interpretation of family photography as a cultural activity derives from the works of the French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, especially his investigation on amateur photography as everyday practice. He maintains that photographic practice exists and subsists by virtue of its family function, to solemnize and immortalize the high points of family life it is assigned the task of strengthening and reinforcing the integration of the family group. Family photography is thus understood as a ritual of the domestic cult in which the family is both subject and object. The photographic arena is where the the autonomous family are together, and at the moments which are family time: the events of rites de passage, ceremonies and leisure time. Bourdieu rejects the psychological explanations referring to photography as a "natural need" and asserts that:
The need for photography and the need to take photographs is neither a
natural need, nor a need created deliberately, it is in reality nothing but a
reflex in the consciousness of the subjects about the social function this
practice serves.
(Un art moyen 103)
The selection of moments which can be photographed is a function of socio-cultural conditions, and the key to understanding the visual symbolic construction is imbedded in the family institution as the basis for this particular practice. This photographic genre emerged in response to a family need, and its meaning must be revealed as part of a broader cultural, rather than aesthetic, context where visual communication creates a symbolic sphere for the family. This accounts for the observation by Bourdieu concerning the total lack of spontaneity governing this cultural practice: "There are few activities which are so stereotyped and less abandoned to anarchy of individual intentions" (Un art moyen 39.) Therefore, because it is subordinated to social functions, this highly structured and systematic enterprise can never become an autonomous practice.
Treated analytically as a cultural construction, family photography can be understood as an instrument in the assertion of bourgeois family ideology, and as an ongoing production of visual myths where an idyllic institutional harmony is continually reproduced in popular pictorical language, drawing on the conventions of the studio picture as well as the established visual schemas of the postcard. The decoding of photographic activity as a process of cultural construction implies the ability to track down the constitutive "frames" of family iconography, to unveil the supporting cultural codes governing the selection of privileged moments, and to trace the continuous "retouching process" towards the authorized family image. The contextualization of "discontinued moments" into discoursive sequences reveals the photographic meaning as visual distillates of dreams, hopes and ideals, and the stock of images from a certain historical time, can be interpreted as a visual testimony of that time, as an interpretation of the world, not windows of the past, when restored to its narrative and iconographic context.
Considering these preceding remarks concerning the medium, the genre and the
leading theoretical authors, we find that the image producer himself takes over
as stage manager, with the family members as actors in the visual family
chronicle, sustained by verbally anchored captions. The family portrait is
visually structured into three arenas of the leisure sphere: The home
(Figure 1)
, the Sunday promenade (Figure 2)
and the holiday (Figures 3-4).
(Figure 3 on the left and figure 4 on the right)
According to the aesthetic conventions developed by Victorian studio photography, the photographer has chosen the representative zone of the drawing room as the scene for his domestic reports. The furniture and decorative artifacts, arranged as theatrical props, function as a visual catalogue of distinctive prestige objects, thus locating the family in the social hierachy. The stage management of the cultivated role-play on the private scene is a visual reflection of the fundamentally hierarchic structures of bourgeois family life of the turn of the century. Formally and rigidly posed in a limited range of settings, the family members are transformed into actors, well rehearsed and in full knowledge of their parts in the family drama. Figures 5-8 depict the range of posing repertoire and display bourgeoise virtues by emphasizing the stereotypical relation patterns of gender and generation in the domestic setting. The presence of the camera has "reframed" family experience into series of "tableaux": an ideal construction of family history. Using visual representations of abstract norms and values, the formal photographic arrangements become effective instruments of integration and idealization, thus illustrating the statement of Bourdieu that, "Nothing may be photographed apart from that which must be photographed" (Un art moyen 44). The photographically hard-handed and stylized rendering of bourgeois morality can never exceed either physical or symbolic lines of demarcation. The taboo areas of work, hygiene, sex life, impurity and disorder are excluded from the picture frame as a non-photographic motif. The cultural markers are fixed; inside the frames harmony, order and respectability prevail. Photography as "home mode" (Chalfen) is a product of, and a disciplinary instrument for, the civilizing prosess.
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