Friday 19 June 2015

Family Frames by Marianne Hirsh


It took me a while to make my way through Marianne Hirsh’s book Family Frames.  The book is so dense with information that it is quite impossible to retain all of it. I think the best thing for me to do here is to concentrate on the themes that I have absorbed, things that I can apply to my own work as it continues to develop; and as my understanding of what photography might be evolves.  I have to say, the more I learn, the more the notion of what a photograph might be is unraveling.  Not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

There are perhaps four reasonably solid ideas I take away from the book:

The first being that the family album serves to sustain the notion of family, reinforcing our ideas of how that institution is shaped and how we might fit into it.  Hirsh says early in the book, “At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[1].

The next big subject that really got me thinking was the idea of the “Gaze” and unconscious optics.  I had come across the gaze earlier in the course but Hirsh looks at the impact of looking, seeing and being seen.  She explores Lacan’s mirror theory and the chapter on this has made me eager to discover more.  Unconscious optics fascinated me;  the screens through which we view the world and thinking about the gaze, how we imagine those looking at us, in the flesh or within a photograph, might perceive us. 

Hirsh then looks at the role of mothers and photography; how the camera interrupts the maternal gaze, transforms it, and ultimately renders the maternal viewpoint, including her fantasies, tangible in the form of a photograph.

Lastly, although by no mean exclusively, as the book really covers a great deal more, is the notion of post-memory which has really struck a chord with me.  Those long held family myths that stem from before one’s own arrival in the world, and which inform so much about how a family operates and sees itself in relation to the world outside of it, and within it.

I will aim to cover each of those aspects in this essay, which forms the basis of my research for Assignment 5.


The Family Romance

The way in which families operate across cultures and history varies significantly and according to Meredith F Small in her book, Our Babies Ourselves, is dependent in large part on the economic needs of the society.  She refers to research that compares urban and agrarian societies, for instance: “In more urban-industrial societies, Le Vine suggests, parents don’t need much from their children because the economic system is constructed so the children are peripheral…*”[2] as opposed to agrarian societies where children are more central and very much expected to contribute to the economic activities of the society, i.e. they will work in the fields, for example.

So it is interesting for me to think about why families take photographs of themselves, which in turn gaze back, reinforcing a fixed idea about how that family should look and be.  We seem to need to believe the way we (whoever we might be) do it is the only way or perhaps the right way.

Hirsh’s second chapter is titled Reframing the Human Family Romance and covers various aspects of myth making with family photography but it is her exploration of Steichen’s Family of Man, which at the time was by far the most successful photographic exhibition to date, that resonated with me most. 

The exhibition is on the surface a celebration of the human family.  There are photographs from all over the world, by famous and not so famous photographers, of people and families; starting with lovers, then pregnancy and babies, then on to play, family, work, war, religion and government.   The way in which it is presented suggests that we humans are essentially all the same – despite our different and varying cultures. 

The power in that message is delivered with considerable force due to the nature of photography.

Hirsh says, “The illusion that photographs simply record a pre-existing external reality, the fact that photographs freeze particular moments in time, and the ambiguity that results from the still picture’s absent context all help to perpetuate a mythology of the family as stable, static and monolithic.[3]

The Family of Man exhibition sold the idea of a “globalized, utopian, family album, a family romance imposed on every corner of the earth”.[4] 

Hirsh goes on to discuss Freud’s notion of the family romance being “a shared individual fantasy of mythic origin: the child’s dream of parental omnipotence and infallibility…” and then “The Family of Man disseminates the fantasies of Steichen and his contemporaries…”[5]

In my mind it is hardly surprising that this sort of mythology, the mythology of a paternalistic, Western, middle class ideal, Freud’s family romance, should be collectively conceived and expressed at that particular point in history.  Why wouldn’t a scarred and traumatised society who had just come out of a global conflict in which many millions of people were brutally slaughtered on all sides, and in the case of the Holocaust, whole towns and communities systematically murdered, need to see the world as a global family who fitted in with an ideal.  Of course that traumatised society, rightly or wrongly, wanted to perpetuate the fantasy of a family romance across the entire globe.  It would be, considering the recent extreme trauma, a mythology that Western society should very much want and perhaps need to buy into. 

Photography offers a powerful reflection of those fantasies which because of its capacity for perpetuating “an illusion of pre-existing reality” can be used by a society in one way or another, commercial advertising as well as cultural exhibition, to convince itself of a reality that is more palatable than the reality they have just experienced.

Hirsh explores the troubling aspects of this wholesale rejection of cultural difference, saying “One could argue that Steichen follows Parsons in promoting the patriarchal bourgeois nuclear family as the norm and standard against which other arrangements are measured.” And “the exhibit invokes nature over culture, thus diminishing, if not erasing, pronounced differences due to culture and history, and thus also naturalizing and sentimentalising the institution of family”[6].   I think this is worth considering whether you’re thinking in micro or macro terms.

Unconscious Optics
I was absolutely fascinated to read about unconscious optics.   Our perception of life, of people, of ourselves are all filtered and mediated through unconscious optics.  I don’t think this was news to me but the level of exploration and the introduction of Lacan’s mirror stage certainly triggered lots of thoughts.  I have always been fascinated by varying cultures and about how people from different parts of the world relate to the word.  I find it extraordinarily interesting for instance, that a tribe in South America (frustratingly I don’t have access to the documentary so have no way of giving any further details) make beer out of saliva.  To us in the West this seems incredible and I have to admit as I watched it I felt revulsion as I saw people drink the frothy fermented liquid.  These differences in culture are so deeply and firmly held that it makes a bit of a nonsense of the Family of Man’s promotion; where we are all ‘naturialized’ in accordance with a Western patriarchal bourgeois model.  The chapter on unconscious optics looks at how we ‘see’ through our cultural and historical screens, and how we have very little control over that since we don’t really have access to our unconscious minds where the foundations for this screens stem from. 

The term ‘unconscious optics’ comes from Walter Benjamin, and Hirsh uses it throughout the book and in particular in relation to Lacan’s notion of the gaze, or look.  I wrote about this earlier on this blog so won’t go into much here but the idea of a looking and seeing, reflecting and being seen all being intrinsically related and caught up in how we build our realities is incredibly interesting for me.  Hirsh goes on to say that the ‘family as a social construct depends on the invisibly of its structuring elements.  Inasmuch as visuality functions as a structuring element determined by the familial gaze, its workings must to some degree remain unconscious”.[7]

This fed into my thoughts about how I would approach A5 and what I hoped to get out of it.  Photography, however seems to have the capability and potential to both perpetuate the myth of the family romance and expose some of its invisible structures – perhaps even do both concurrently. 

Walter Benjamin, who Hirsh quotes, discusses Edward Mybridges series of horses running:

“Evidently a different nature opens itself up to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.  Even if one has general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride… Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.”

We as a culture, when putting together family albums at any rate opt for feeding into the myths, the romance.  The details of everyday life, the quotidian mundaneness is not typically focused on.  But what I found in my own project is that emerges regardless, and even when it is, the mythology is very difficult to quash.  So, my photographic interventions may have revealed some of the structural relationships within our family or perhaps exposed some of the tensions, but my edit nevertheless feeds into the notion of a family romance, albeit a more than slightly tense one. 

Post Memory
Hirsh describes post memory as one of the most important or influential unconscious screens or optics.  By this she is referring to the history of a family, not only theirs but also of the family’s community.  I was very interested in this aspect especially since Hirsh’s Jewish family was from Romania, and like so many during WW2, relatives she never knew were deported or killed.  Whole communities wiped out.  The legacy of this history continues to inform generations since and I certainly relate to this as my own family, as I have mentioned in previous blog posts, were from Czechoslovakia.  My father’s father, as far as I am aware, was one of very few Fried’s to have escaped the Final Solution, having left for England before the war began.

I touch on post memory briefly here because it seemed like an incredibly important aspect of the book, and of how we see in general, plus how families see  - both as individuals within the family plus as a group looking inwards and out.  The sense of persecution, guilt, and pain, deeply held horror that exists within families who have a history linked to the Holocaust is immensely powerful and influential.  I am reminded of the book about Diane Arbus and a quote I used when writing about it –

We grew up in an emotional desert of shame - never affirmation - and those of us who were taught to be assimilated were filled with self-loathing'"[8].  

Everything that I have written about here, all that has resonated with me seems to be at least in part due to the post-memory of my own family.  Not only the Holocaust connection but also the Victorian ethic that pervaded my mother’s upbringing.

I remembered the following quote for years although could not recall where I had read it until I picked up The Magus recently to reread. 

“”I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.[9]

The post memory in our family that pertains to that ‘monstrous dwarf’ resonates today and I have long been aware of it, especially in relation to the family mythology (as opposed to family romance – by mythology I refer to the stories within a family that get told again and again over the years) which I have listened to since yearly childhood.  For instance I was told repeatedly about how my mother was punished and shamed for undressing her doll in front of boys at an early birthday party, or how she undressed herself at boarding school and stood on the window ledge for passers by to see (mostly boys I am led to understand).  These stories feed into our perception of ourselves, our families and how we see; looking inwardly and outwardly. In other words, family mythology and post memory are integral parts of those unconscious optics.

Mothers and photography

The final aspect to the book (and I have in no way covered everything), which I found useful in terms of A5 at any rate, is the chapter about mothers and mother photographers.  Lacan’s gaze is important here because of the idea that a child’s development is dependent on a loving gaze from their primary carer, which in most cases tends to be the mother. 

The role of the mother in mammalian development has long been understood to be critical for healthy, well-adjusted, functioning mammals.  John Bowlby’s attachment theory was hugely influential and for instance led to a change in the way children are hospitalized, so that care is taken to keep consistent and regular contact with parents, and in cases of very young children, constant during a child’s stay. 

Although only one aspect of the symbiotic relationship between mother a child, the gaze between these two, and other members of the family informs and influences the way in which a child develops.  In Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book, Mothers & Others[10], there is a diagram indicating just how much of a human’s brain is given over to communicating, seeing, looking understanding, receiving and giving information – and although the eyes are by no mean the only part of this process, seeing, looking and being seen are integral. (The question of blindness brings up many questions when thinking about Lacan’s theories and I can only say at this point that the subject is so complex I can’t quite get my heard around it for now, however, I wanted to flag it up that I am aware of it!)  (You can see the full article inlcuding the diagram I mention here - page 75) . 

Hirsh looks at how there has been criticism of mothers who photograph their children and amongst others she focuses on Sally Mann whose Immediate Family is so well known, and which generated such a strong response, both positive and negative.  She discusses how the looking that goes on between a mother and her children, looking that is essential to a developing sense of self, is said to be disrupted when eyes are replaced by a camera, changing the mother’s organic eye into a machine.  And therefore replacing the process of looking with a “gaze”.  As I have seen and understood it the word gaze is pejorative; it is power based and I have noticed often used to describe the activity of male artists creating female nudes over the centuries.  Hirsh doesn’t fully accept the negative ramifications of turning a mother’s look into a gaze and explores various positions surrounding what feels to me enormously difficult and contentious. 

“Mann’s children can see in her photographs the operation of the gaze; they can see how the maternal look can be displaced by a maternal gaze.  The images show them how culture sees children, what fears and fantasies structure childhood and therefore structures them”.  She also goes on to say that Mann’s children ”demonstrate some control over the perpetuation of their images… they can manipulate the images through their own play with costume and make-up; they can mimic and thus play with the childhood into which the maternal gaze – even if it is seen as disembodied, monstrous, phallic and devitalizing  - has fixed on them”.[11]

Mann argues that “Photographing them in those quirky, often emotionally charged moments has helped me to acknowledge and resolve some of the inherent contradictions between the image of motherhood and reality”.[12]

The difference between reality and pre-conceptions of what that reality ought to be is what interests me mostly.  It ties in with the opening paragraphs of this (rather long!) blog entry-

“At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[13].

I think Mann in this instance has perhaps turned that on it’s head by taking photographs that defy the usual self-presentations, challenges the status quo and instead deals with a different reality, one that links to our very real and in some cases justified fears about childhood and sexuality, as well as fantasy, play, and the idea of children being separate from real humanity.


Conclusion 
Before I end I will briefly say that Hirsh covers a great deal about the Holocaust and I am a bit lost with some or much of it – although I find myself drawn to these chapters due to my own family links I feel I will need to revisit those chapters when I have understood and digested bit more about the role of photography and linking us to our histories.

Overall, the book has deepened my understanding of what photography might be, carrying on from my reading of Barthes and then James Elkin.  Hirsh does adumbrate some of Barthes theories, which is always useful.  It must all be very much on my mind though because last night I dreamt a photograph of mine was hanging in a restaurant.  In it there were trees, a stream and a group of children, some of whom I think were mine.  And every time I looked at the photograph I noticed the children come to life and start playing.  When I looked away they stopped.  They couldn’t leave the photograph, they were tiny but they were real - although real in another reality and one that I could not actually climb into.  And that is what I think I have learned about photography – the illusion of reality is immensely powerful even though it can never be real.  The photograph is nothing more than a flat representation of a version of reality at one particular moment in time, made up of dots on a screen or pigment on paper.  And that is all it will ever be.  But our brains expect a photograph to be real because it looks real, and so our brain does what it can to make it seem real.  Editing, in the case of a series of photographs, adds to the illusion.  This makes photography an extremely powerful tool for advertisers and makers of propaganda the world over.









[1] Page 9 Family Frames
[2] Our Babies Ourselves Meredith F Small page 54 Anchor Books 1998 *I would argue that within our present cultural paradigm women are expected to make a choice about whether or no they want to exist on the on the periphery with their children or else abandon the caregiving role of mothering in order to be at work.  Although this is changing with more sustainable maternity laws, and in some countries for both parents.
[3] Page 51 Family Frames
[4] Page 51 Family Frames
[5] Page 52 Family of Man
[6] Talcott Parsons – Structural Functionalism
[7] Page 117 Family Frames
[8] Diane Arbus: A Biography By Patricia Bosworth, Open Road - Integrated Media, Published 1984, Kindle Edition 2012
[9] Page 15, The Magus by John Fowles, Kindle Edition, Vintage, New Edition 2004, First published 1965.
[10] Page 40, Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Belknap Harvard, 2009
[11] Page 159 & 160 Family Frames
[12] Page 161 Family Frames (Sally Mann quoted)
[13] Page 9 Family Frames

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