Book Review: Family Photography Now

Family Photography Now

By Sophie Howarth and Stephen Mclaren
Thames & Hudson | 240 pp.  

As lackluster as family photos often are, especially among the iPhone/point-and-shoot subculture, the same imagery can rise to the level of art at the hands of a serious, creative photographer. That’s the idea behind an instructive new collection. In Family Photography Now, the authors bring together images from 40 talented shooters who either lift the lid on their own gene pools or manage to infiltrate other people’s lives. These beautifully reproduced photographs are, by turns, wry and poignant, outrageous and inspirational, and add up to a diverse amalgam of emotions, idiosyncrasies and ideas.

Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren brush past common mannerisms in the book’s opening section, (titled “Is My Family Normal?”), quoting photographer Martin Parr’s memorable line, “most family photo albums are a form of propaganda.” Then they proceed to subvert that idea with an edgy selection of pictures that, in their words, “tackle the emotional roller coaster of family life…cutting through the glut of smiling snapshots and tightly choreographed nuclear units…”

Their result is a rambunctious assortment of 320-plus intimate vignettes—parchment-skinned grandparents, wailing toddlers, lots of people in their underwear, cluttered sofas, muffin tops, yard sales and breastfeeding moms. Overall, Family Photography Now is a rich, fascinating show and a terrific resource for anyone tasked as the family’s designated shooter (which happens to us all), along with anyone who offers, or is contemplating offering, this specialty on his or her website.

A series of color portraits of same sex American Families, drawing on the classical history of portraiture. Photo © 2016 Alix Smith

Book Excerpt

In her introduction to the new book Family Photography Now, photographer Sophie Howarth discusses the function and evolution of photographing families. 

The way we take, edit and share family photographs has been transformed by changes in technology, but their social and emotional function has remained fairly constant: they are essentially a means of establishing connection and belonging. During the 19th century, when photography was still an expensive and cumbersome medium, even families who could afford to visit photographers’ studios would generally only do so to mark important occasions such as christenings, marriages or deaths. In 1900, Kodak launched the Box Brownie camera, priced at $1 and pre-loaded with film, after which more and more families began taking their own pictures. First smiles, first steps, birthdays and holidays made up the vast majority of the so-called “Kodak moments” of the 20th century. Most middle-class families around the world owned some kind of point-and-shoot camera by the end of the 20th century, but it was the combined influence of digital photography and mobile phone technology at the start of 21st century that almost universalized access to the medium. Today the United Nations estimate that six of the world’s seven billion people have mobile phones, and at least 80% of those have cameras. The vast majority of people taking pictures now have only ever done so on a phone, and they use photography to keep in touch with family and friends moment to moment, rather than to lay down memories for posterity. By the time you have read this page, more than half a million photographs will have been uploaded to Snapchat, currently the world’s most popular photo-messaging application. By the time you turn over, they will all have been deleted, since Snapchat only keeps each photo for a maximum of 10 seconds. It is easy to carp at such ephemerality but “photo chat” arguably serves the function of keeping families connected better than its analogue ancestor.

Aleks Krotoski, an expert in psychology and digital technology, has championed the emotional benefits of new photographic technologies for globally dispersed families. As she summarizes: “We live in an increasingly transient world, where the need to make a living has given rise to mass migration to urban centers in every country. Children are separated from parents, siblings from one another and the web has provided us with the devices that make it easy to stay in touch.” She notes that her own family is scattered around the globe, but “we mean the same thing to one another as we always have…. [We] used to sit around the slide projector and tell the same old stories until we laughed so hard we cried.” Now, thanks to Flickr, Facebook and the many other online photo-sharing sites, “We don’t have to be co-present to feel like we’re taking part in each other’s lives. I look at my mum’s photos online and we then laugh about her travel exploits. Dad sends snaps of his orchids and his travels. But those are their experiences, rather than the shared ones that exist from particular moments of our lives. I get a sense of them as individuals by having access to their photo stories. And we get a sense of us together – whatever that family arrangement might be – when we look at photos of us together.”

Melancholic composites exploring the loneliness of China’s one-child generation Photo © 2016 Fan Shi San

Family photography isn’t so much about documenting as shaping our family narratives. We organize our albums, whether physical or digital, to tell the story we want to believe about our lives. We photograph our relatives when they bring us the most joy, and often return to those photographs when that joy seems to elude us. Curator Val Williams has described family photographs acting like “a talisman against the real,” suggesting they offer a kind of magical protection from the troubling reality of our everyday lives. It is, after all, so much easier to feel affection for the smiling baby on a screensaver than the same child screaming because they don’t want to go to sleep, or for the man or woman gazing into our eyes in a soft-edged wedding photograph on the mantelpiece than the person whose infidelity we’ve just discovered.

Excerpted from FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY NOW, by Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren
Copyright © 2016 Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Thames & Hudson, Inc. www.thamesandhudsonusa.com 

Related: 
Learn how to capture genuine, emotional images of families in this CreativeLive video tutorial “Family Photography: Modern Storytelling”

Finessing the Fine Art of Family Photography, Above the Herds of Hobbyists