(As a salutary aside, I’ll record that there are tougher souls than me and my friends and they often own cameras. I’ve met with similar feelings in many others my age or older and all agree, Anyone past forty must walk with care into any room hung with vanished faces. My own response is not as eccentric as it may seem. Decades later, I still avoid the miles of home-movies which show them strong and gesturing happily. Gramps fades into blank unreachable solitude and dies, Aunt Marge takes to drink yet their pictures are now both glad reminders of their best and painful tokens of loss.Īfter the deaths of my own parents, for instance, years passed before I could look at their photographs with pleasure. Still, with every month that the images age, their air of melancholy deepens. We take the pictures in love and respect (or at least affection). Yet even the two extremes of the family photo-the paradeground image of Dad well-combed in his Easter suit or the jokeshot of Aunt Marge fleeing in housecoat and curlers-are unavoidably sabotaged for us by time. I’m sure there are many more, but those I name have unquestionably mastered a hard kind of witness, the long and unflinching gaze at family facts or the near-adjacent plights of neighbors. Gramps, the slow account of his grandfather’s fall into mindless decay. Apart from the four whose work appears here, the two others who come readily to mind are Richard Avedon and the scalding sequence by Dan Jury in his book. If I try to recall comparably powerful images, by contemporary artists at work among their kinsmen, the scope narrows drastically. cameramen who preserved the Holocaust for reenactment among us. Surely the great majority of photographs that speak of the endless grief sustained indoors by blood-relations are images taken by strangers-the world-icons of hunger and pain by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans’s level gaze at heroic domestic misery, even the work of those S.S.
But unless you have prior knowledge of the secrets they hide-financial desperation, hard drinking, insanity-you’d never guess from a single image that these straight-standers, wreathed in grins, are less than masters of their fates. Throughout the Depression of the 1920s and ’30s, my parents and their kin snapped each other furiously. Yet in all the mountainous family archive, how many images speak or attempt to speak a large truth? How many family groups hint at the intricate webs of attraction, repulsion, love, and hate that most families harbor? How many wedding photographs suggest the neat groom’s riotous past, the bride’s fear of it? And Mother is likely to smooth her hair Father is likely to suck in his belly, at the whiff of a lens. No wonder primitives view portrait photographs with awe, even dread. All but dangerous self-haters are fascinated by pictures of themselves, those one-dimensional dolls that tell us how we look to the world, dolls that can be held and studied at will- that, strangest of all, may long outlast our bodies. The subject either returns the artist’s emotion and agrees to pose, or again the subject has bought the artist’s skill. The artist either cherishes, respects, or is otherwise held by the subject or the subject has hired him. Why? Why do portraits of the living constitute a major share of all human painting? (And there’d be more painted portraits, if they weren’t so costly.) The first answer would seem to be unarguable - because both subject and artist agree that this face and at least a part of this body are worthy of memory and of at least this much rescue from eroding time. Aren’t most of them pictures of the children, the baby, of Mother and Father, the entire clan after Thanksgiving dinner or the larger crowd of neighbors and friends? The claim seems to hold when we look further back a hundred and fifty years, through box-camera snapshots and studio portraits to tintypes and beyond. For the present, think only of the thousands of rolls of film exposed in America daily. If a count could be taken of all the images captured by the camera since photography was invented, I'm sure that images of family would account for a high percentage of the staggering total-say, ninety percent of the hundreds of millions.
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