Re-locating the family album

The family album is dead, long live the family album!

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I was excited, and a little daunted, to have had my abstract on family album practices accepted by the Ethnography Symposium 2019. It is a conference I have attended before but mainly in relation to my professional consultancy work. It is a delightfully mixed disciplinary and friendly community so I am hoping all will be well.

It was a bit of surprise to discover, when I tracked back, just how long this project has been developing. It started with a photography module I was doing with Open College for the Arts (OCA) called Digital Image & Culture (started in 2017). We were encouraged to explore the role of artist as archivist and that took me to my family photo albums. As I looked at photos of us as children in the late sixties playing in the sun of Australia something led me to recall the film ‘Oranges and Sunshine,’ exposing the scandal of the Child Migrant Programme. It is impossible not to be moved by the appalling injustices suffered by children as young as three as they were sent to the colonies under the premise of gaining a better life. I created a book that contrasts some of my family album images with distorted Australian flora, an attempt to convey my respectful emotional responses to the stories of the Child Migrants.

At the time of doing this work my Mum also reminded me that my Grandmother had burnt many of her childhood photographs.

This surfaced an inquiry question: what must it be like to have never seen a childhood photograph; to have never owned a family album?

Months of literature review, conversation and interviews followed. I talked to family photographers about their practices and what is expected of them by the families that commission them. I participated in online fora and researched how other artists have explored this field like Erik Kessels, Jo Spence and Fiona Tan.

I was particularly struck by what everyone seemed to be describing as shifting practices from the non-digital to the digital. I was also intrigued by my own responses as various people told me they were digitising their family photographs with the intention of throwing the physical albums away.

When the call for papers for the Ethnography Symposium 2019 was advertised it seemed like an ideal chance to draw this work together and reflect on what had emerged so far. It was an opportunity to review the methodological approaches I had been using, noticing the shifts to and fro, from autoethnography to thing ethnography and to digital ethnography. In reading ‘Digital Ethnography’ (Pink et al., 2015) I was struck by the proposed principles, which resonated with my approach:

1. Multiplicity
2. Non-digital-centricness
3. Openness
4. Reflexivity
5. Unorthodox

To which I would suggest adding a sixth, that of reciprocity. I think this has been a key feature in communicating with social media groups about their family album practices. The principle that gave me pause for thought was unorthodox and it led me to thinking about how I would present my research beyond the usual written and PowerPoint formats. In the name of remediation, I decided to look at other possible formats. This took me back to ‘things’ and as a result I have explored different book structures. I have created a folded (above) and a flutter book to illustrate some of the themes of the research.

So far, the core themes that have emerged are:

• Remediation – the interactions of old and new technologies, a sense of dialogue and competition between them
• Entanglements – a growing view that the binary of material and digital is no longer relevant as our shifting practices are more fluid and entangled. This is particularly evident in what I am describing as ‘transitional practices’ where physical photographs are reunited with the original environment and re-photographed
• Co-location and co-presence: changing the focus of the family album from an intimate co-located experience with family and friends to the flows of social media and potentially global co-presencing

Potential for future research:

Starting this work around family album and domestic photography has highlighted potential for further research, both methodologically and in terms of focus. Picking up on the ‘unorthodox’ principle of digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2015) an online site could be established for people to tell the stories of their photograph albums rather than single images. There is also scope to explore further approaches to the ‘found album and photographs’ and how they are impacting practice.

Claims of the potential loss of family photography when it is stored digitally offers scope for further research as this implies a value judgement linked to the ‘thing’ more than practices, which may be generation specific. I am also struck that in considering both the digital domain and domestic photography the dead are co-present as much as the living. There is something more to be explored in these online biographies being multi-authored with the potential to disrupt the traditional distinctions in ‘identity boundaries.’ (Gibson, 2014: 222)

I was concerned this work might be a distraction but increasingly see it as intertwined with my interests in ephemerality, mortality and change.

Child Migrant Scheme

For more information on the CMS please see the website for the Child Migrant Trust

References

Gibson, M. (2014). Digital objects of the dead: Negotiating electronic remains. In The social construction of death (pp. 221-238): Springer.

Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2015). Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (Vol. Kindle Ed.): SAGE Publications.