Today’s extracts are taken from the book, The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900, by Max Kozloff (2007):
‘All happy families’, wrote Tolstoy, ‘resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Since he was a novelist, he preferred to write about families jostled by unhappy circumstance that went their own way. In photography, though, the family album is looked on as a chronicle of intimacies, unexceptionally pleasant and recorded at length. Certainly the pictures [from earlier in the book] of the Kentucky families, the American socialites and the Mexican plutocrats recall the album genre. These characters exhibit a uniform complaisance. But this is only an empirical function of their pose, whose self-satisfaction is left in the lurch by a troubled view, sometimes an animosity. It is unthinkable for a real family album to display adverse news of its subjects. But during the last few decades, the album genre has served as a model for a novelistic purpose to document the particular hazards of attrition from within an inner social circle, as witnessed by one of their own. Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971), Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) and Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh (1996) are all iconic examples of these kind of projects. The first two are accounts of the photographers’ close friends entangled within their raw, druggy subcultures; the last resembles a score settled by a young man against his fractious, working-class family. These were confidential reports on lives bumping around in a kind of domestic bell jar — lives accustomed to the voyeur among them, even if just then they were going badly.
The family album of Chris Verene (b. 1969) also records painful conditions — but quite differently, since they are filtered through an affectionate regard. Around 1983, while still an adolescent, he began to photograph his family in Galesburg, Illinois. In later years, on visits from Atlanta, where he went to work, he kept tabs on family and friends in his home town as they changed. From their stories he learned, as he says, how ‘to handle the stressful emotions of marriage break-ups, mental imbalance, old age, nursing homes, loneliness, and death’. His work resonates with the transformations of a family tied into this natural cycle in which characters grow faint, disband and fall away. He chooses the format of a visual diary, augmented with captions about grandparents, cousins, aunts and friends, which tell us about their personal affairs.
… Verene walks right into the lives of his folks, showing you how they are, without any embarrassment on either side. Their togetherness is taken for granted so openly that the viewer feels at each moment like one of them, a member of the clan. In the picture entitled Meeting Mom’s New Boyfriend, the camera is positioned near the shagpile carpet, like a pet, and in front of the reclining son.
… Verene’s colour brings all this together. It is tender, warm, sensual, though naturally it stops well short of being glamorous. Whether pastel or in higher saturation, it advances through the kitchen, the bedroom, the vestibule and the parlour, flooding them all with a strange sweet romance. This is the world of his childhood, which he had left to become a successful rock musician and photographer. Faces and things retain their daily — and untidy — presence, in itself of no great moment.At the same time, they are transmitted by hues that enhance the complexion of his feelings.
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… The family is a micro-unit within larger communities that still, in many parts of the world, might be called tribal. To be sure, blood is only one of many ties that bind people in a common lifestyle and social perspective. But the family, in fact and as a metaphor, endures as a recurrent theme of group identification. That is why Steichen used is as a logo of togetherness, a sincere but fallacious hypothesis. Much as it can be enjoyed, Fellini’s idea of the circus tent of human differences is equally flawed. How can either of these generalizations remain fixed categories when illustrated in the maw of incidental experience? They are just too epic to give more than a schematic understanding of peoples in their cultures today.
Nothing is more obvious to viewers now than the plasticity of cultures — adhesion to it a way of holding on, release from it a chance to enlarge the inner view. No wonder the portrait record is filled with confusion, excitement, follies, pathology and grief — phenomena that have drawn photographers whose curiosity is enthralled by the spectacle of heritage stubbornly affirmed or pragmatically abandoned. The individuality of sitters is swallowed up in this broad sweep of contested zones. Yet the pictures of insiders in their cultures tell us that some aspect of collective typicality in group behaviour is essential to each member’s sense of origin, memory and sharing, no matter what the cost.
When it does attend to isolated or stranded customs, portraiture has certainly implied that they are difficult to bridge. Yet no one can say that they are graven in stone. We are protean creatures, composites of peculiar or enigmatic and yet oddly familiar instincts. ‘If everyone is a stranger’, writes Michael Walzer, ‘then no one is. For unless we recognize sameness in some form, we cannot recognize otherness … There are still boundaries, but they are blurred by all the crossings. We still know ourselves to be this or that, but the knowledge is uncertain, for we are also this and that’. Between the condition of the ‘or’, the option he cites, and the ‘and’, the connection he affirms, we find ourselves in the same boat. How vividly the faces of others uncover this dialectic truth, whose lateness in coming is a cause of surprise.
-Julie
