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| A personal photo from my own collection: the church family |
As with academic treatments of other forms of photography thus far encountered, chapter author Patricia Holland cautions private photography is fraught with exception making generalization difficult.
Holland prefers private or personal to family photography, for though in its history it has been associated with the family, it often covers far more than family life. That we have come to see it as “family” photography, though, may tell us something about how we conceive of image making and the purpose of family. What is unique about photography as a family activity is that it produces objects that are loaded with meaning and subject to interpretation. They are typically taken to portray the subject as he or she wishes to be seen. They are also valued less for their quality than for their content and context in confirming identity.
Holland distinguishes between users and readers, an inner and outer circle. Users are those familiar with the context of the image - where it was made, under what circumstances, what it intends to portray. The reader, on the other hand, is someone outside the personal circle who understand the image based only on its own terms. Private photos come embedded with code available only to users. Holland sees the interest in personal photographs as playing on this gap between a somewhat trivial medium and products with rich embedded meaning.
Histories of personal photography are often presented through the prism of technology, but within the past quarter century interest has grown in histories of family, women, and everyday life of common people.
Some see photography not just a product of modernity, but instrumental in constructing modernity, a tool for recording, objectifying and quantifying the external world.
Since the growth of digital technologies private photography has become a means for exploring identity, even “an act of self-contemplation.” Holland notes the paradox of something so important being conducted through a practice typically considered non-serious.
A very large caveat regarding this chapter: it’s assumptions and examples are entirely English.
In and Beyond the Charmed Circle of Home
From its inception the camera recorded both the known and unknown, domestic life and the exotica of foreign lands. Holland illustrates this nicely with the photo albums of a 19th century family that includes scenes of domesticity paired with imagery from India and Persia taken during the husband’s military and industrial service. In records such as these, Holland observes, tourism often overlaps with colonial rule. (Similar results can be found today among the image collections of military personnel stationed overseas.)
From very early on there was great demand for photos of the the foreign and many photographers were quick to take advantage. Holland mentions Frances Firth having made three separate trips to the ME to create images of famous Biblical sites. Images such as these came bound in paradox. On the one hand they were sold as exotica, but their realism carried an unintended message: these were real places, with real people, and were therefore no more exotic than photographs of the consumer’s family, home, or city.
Holland notes that popular photography was rarely a medium of public record. People were not interested in realism, but exaggerated certain aspects of reality. Abroad this resulted in documents of the exotic, while domestically there was a large appetite for romantic nostalgia, of images that captured a disappearing rural life. More elaborate fantasies were sold in stereoscopic images, theatrically staged scenes from popular literature and imagination, with titles such as Weddings, Christenings, Ghosts, and The Distressed Seamstress.
The great rage was portraiture, with studios throughout most urban centers offering the opportunity to immortalize one’s visage. Of course what was being sold was a certain perception of oneself, a way of creating one’s identity, from the clothes worn, to the pose, to the background that served as one’s stage. The craze led in bourgeois circles to the printing and collecting of carte-de-viste, paper printed images that one could distribute like modern business cards. A fad developed for collecting the cards of the famous and powerful, as did the idea of creating decorative photo albums, in which it wasn’t enough simply to arrange one’s photos, but arrange them artfully by cropping pictures into shapes, such as hearts, and trimming them with lace.
As photographs became a central object of domestic life, photography came to be seen as a soft science suitable for practice by females. In reality this meant for those with the adequate financial means to afford domestic help and camera equipment. There were, on the other hand, also a number of professional females doing portraiture work.
One interesting aspect of domestic imaging I had not encountered previously were images of the dead. Holland notes that family albums of the period contain images of mothers with dead infants.
Early personal photography is absent among the working classes, who could not afford the equipment nor the time to learn to operate it. All such images are those made by outsiders who were unconcerned to represent the working class as they saw themselves, but for other purposes, political and social. Holland notes that some of the earliest photographs to appear in working class family collections in the UK are school class photographs. By the end of the century as working conditions improved and the technology became cheaper and more widely available, the working classes began to make images of themselves. Holland notes that even so they favored the professional portraits, perhaps because their images lent prestige. Like the middle classes, they too were concerned that photos represent them as they wished to appear.
...to be continued...
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