Family, we all have one, whether we’d like to admit it or not. Sometimes we just like to deny the fact we have family due to certain issues, an unstable relationship, a separation of parents, not seeing eye to eye, distance, and so on. Many of us get to a point where we forget the significance of family, or it’s just put on the backburner due to our own busy, intricate lives. “Unfamiliar Family” is an exhibition including the artists Angela Strassheim, Lisa Lindvay, Larry Sultan, and Sarah Faust; which shines different lights on family issues, personal connections to parents and siblings, and to take a more intimate look at those relationships. Each of these artists look through different windows inside the lives of their families, their surroundings, and both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of their connections to them.
Family and Photography has gone hand in hand since the invention of the camera. At first it was images created of important people within the family, adults who could sit through the long exposures of early cameras. As exposure times went from hours, to minutes, to seconds there were photographs made of victorian children, which are refered to as hidden mother photographs.
As cameras and film became more affordable, and with exposure times being mere seconds, snap shots of families began to be commonplace. Since then we’ve been taking pictures of family as a regular act. Memories of holidays, birthdays, big events such as graduation or a new car have all been documented on film. The thing is, the camera has always been pointed towards the younger generations, towards the children. Just look through your boxes of old Polaroids or negatives developed at the corner drug store. They mostly consist of you growing up. It’s not common fro us to take the camera from our parents hands and point it at them.
This exhibition is meant to exchange ownership of the camera and focus its view back towards the others in your family. Though each of these artists are looking at their families through different cameras, different light, and looking at multiple issues within; they all create photographs that truly get inside the lives of their families and give us that opportunity to look through their eyes.
Larry Sultan Pictures From Home is a portrait project, using his parents as his subjects and their home as the setting. Sultan has explained this project started after his father was forced into early retirement; “Photographing my father became a way of confronting my confusion about what it is to be a man in this culture. Unaware of deeper impulses, I convinced myself that I wanted to show what happens when – as I interpreted my father’s fate – corporations discard their no-longer-young employees, and how the resulting frustrations and feelings of powerlessness find their way into family relations.”
Through Sultans use of his own photographs, still images from old home movies, family snapshots and mementos and transcribed interviews and conversations with his parents, Pictures From Home became much more about family and how time and outside events affect it.
Sultans image, “My Mother Posing for Me”, captures a moment in his parent’s life, though staged, shows the life of a retiree and his wife. Sultans father sits to the left of the image, watching a baseball game on an older tube television, placed on a white wrought iron shelf, with two plants placed on top. Sultan’s mother stands slightly off center to the right of the image, and as stated, is posing for the camera, staring straight into it. Light from the right falls upon the subjects, and creates a lush color palette with green walls and carpeting, his mothers shimmering metallic pink blouse, his fathers button up shirt with an intricate pattern, all get illuminated and dance the viewers eyes around the image.
Similar in subject and style, Sarah Faust creates images of her mother, in her series Photographs of My Mother. Like Sultan, Faust’s project is that of which documents her mothers journey into the later years of her life and the bond between mother and daughter. Faust states, “In photographing myself and loved ones I investigate its vulnerability, even its mortality.” This project is an exploration of the “idea that one’s memories and feelings may overlap from one generation to the next.” Faust creates images that compare and contrast her mothers and her own body, which capture the small interactions between them.
In Faust’s image “Untitled(with baby Mimi)” she photographs herself, her mother and her child all through the kitchen window. The intelligent composition of the image creates a separation between subjects even though they are all captured in this one photography. A square framing from the window frame forms around Faust and her baby that she is holding. Faust stares straight on into the camera, her child off towards the left in the direction of Faust’s mother. Her mother looks out to the left of the image, out another kitchen window. The kitchen itself is mostly white, in the foreground a table and chairs with some adornment around their edges sit towards the bottom of the image, some regular kitchen items sit on the counter tops. The real subject matter here is the generations of women in this family, Mothers, and Daughters.
In Lisa Lindvay’s ongoing series, she is creating images of her father, sister and two brothers as they deal with her mother’s deteriorating mental health. Lindvay captures the physical and emotional aspects of her family within her families home. Lindvay states that, “The photographs expose how my mother’s illness influences the condition of the space and emotional well being of my family members. This is an exploration of how individual identity is shaped and altered within our familial relationship.”
Many of Lindvay’s photos are a personal look into the lives of her family members. Throughout her series the state of the house greatly reflects that of the mental state of her family; broken plaster on the walls, junk food present in their rooms, a sense of disregard for vanity. Yet each of the images shows comfortableness about them. The way the subjects are photographed, how they are both the viewer and viewed.
In “Dinner”, her father and brothers are sitting on the ground, behind a long, low coffee table. McDonalds is sprawled across it, yet not much attention is being given to anything by the subjects. The brother on the right is examining his fry while the father in center and brother to the left are staring at what seems to be nothingness. This photograph is very much based on the last supper image, but creates a parody in a sense due to the subjects and fast food on the table.
Angela Strassheim’s series deals with family and religious influences in her series “Left Behind” which focuses on “the memory and evidence people create that outlives them.” Her family is the main focus of this body of work. These images are created in a way that is influenced by her childhood and adult memories. The photographs are taken meticulously, seeing as how Strassheim had started off in forensic photography, and mirror the strictness evoked in her religious upbringing. This series brings many things to focus in which would be considered religious upbringings. Images of children and their “purity”, dinnertime prayers (both at home and at McDonalds), rooms perfectly placed, the hunting of animals and even suicide.
Strassheim’s photo “Untitled (Grandmother)” is a prime image to think about the series title “Left Behind”. A series that deal with thoughts of the rapture and religion and family has been captured in this perfectly composed image. A deceased elderly woman, in a pink coffin, wearing a pink outfit, and a pink glow illuminated the subject all beg to question, was this woman left behind? What is her memory that will outlive her, what will outlast the life that she lived?
Unfamiliar Family is an exhibition that begs viewers to look into their own family life and ask questions. To ask about their own feelings, their prides, their shortcomings, their fears. Each of these artists bring something unique, just how every family is unique, no matter how normal things might seem. This exhibition hopes to have viewers realize the unfamiliar in the familiar. The smallest things can change the way your family functions; the interactions with your parents and siblings, your religion or lack thereof, the mental and physical state of those around you and the unexpected events that change the dynamics in your family.
-William Tallon-
Sources
Angela Srassheim
http://www.wipnyc.org/blog/angela-strassheim
-Left Behind
http://www.marvelligallery.com/LBCatalogueEssay.html
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2005/05/artseen/angela-strassheim
-Family Studies
http://jenniferhearn.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/angela-strassheim/
Larry Sultan
-Pictures of Home
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/10/roswell-angier-roswell-angier-on-larry-sultan-pictures-from-home-2006.html
http://larrysultan.com/gallery/pictures-from-home/info
Lisa Lindvay
http://www.mocp.org/collection/mpp/lindvay_lisa.php
http://www.lisalindvay.com/projects/project-text
Sarah Faust
-Photographs of mother
http://www.mocp.org/collection/mpp/past/faust_sarah.php
http://www.mocp.org/detail.php?t=objects&type=browse&f=maker&s=Faust%2C+Sarah&record=2












