Family Files

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From the catalogue of the exhibition

La Familia

By Galia Gur Zeev and Ronit Eden

“Dad stood facing me. He was younger than I remembered him and was on the dirt road of the farm. His eyes gazed directly into the camera lens, and, by the closed look on his face, I could see that he was waiting for the moment when he could return to his daily affairs. His facial features and build resembled mine. I was slimmer, my face more childlike, but I could see myself through his image.” (Itamar Orlev, Pietà)
Existence and continuity are the forces that motivate the family—hence the magic of family albums. Folded into the family album is the desire to preserve family memory and thus express generational continuity. The family album, found in almost every home, holds our individual heritage as members of the family unit, shows individual identity and a self-portrait, and is part of our photographic heritage.

The family is the basic human social unit. A word derived from the term, “familiarity,” comprises everything that we ascribe to this unit—its desires and its prejudices. The word “family” awakens in us an uncontrollable chain of associations. In this initial contextual system of human relationships, we identify ourselves and others. In its bosom, we learn our first lessons in the art of living. The family is not only the paradise of our innocent and idyllic childhood; it is also our first field of battle. The myth of family is costly to maintain.

Four figures, say, might appear in a photograph: in the center sits a man looking directly at the camera, hands placed on his knees, fingers slightly spread apart. On his right stands a woman, her left hand on his shoulder, as if leaning or holding him, her head slightly bent as she glances at him. With her right arm, she holds a sleeping baby. To the left of the man stands a youth, his arms held taut along the sides of his body, his eyes glued in front of him.

The image’s description instantly entices us into thinking that this is a family being photographed for an event that will enter the family album, dated with the year of the photograph. The interpretation of this image is shared by us as a society. For the family, the image constitutes a documented record that holds a memory. As such, it enables the building of the family’s history. Its value depends on the ability to interpret it in the context that it was made. This interpretation also includes the reservoir of family images shared by us as a society, built over the years, and based on existing images from a common cultural past and on associations awakened by the sight of familiar situations. The images are taken from various areas in our lives: from personal and family history, from the history of place or landscape, or from famous scenes in the history of art. This is the reason that it is possible to find similar photographs in other family albums and also the reason that we identify with images in family albums, even if they are not our own.
“When people live in a historic era and participate in doing … the difference is blurred, and at different points in time, the “I” becomes identical to the “we”; only after many days does a person return to his own skin, and is then, perhaps, also able to talk about a number of things as if “I was there.” (Shulamith Hareven, Many Days: An Autobiography)

Until the 1970s, there was an affinity between the image of the Jewish people, who were formed by and built the State of Israel, and the image of the family. Family photographs dealt with defining the family, which was also home and homeland. Many of those who participated in building the new country left family members behind, and all that remained with them were a few photographs from the country they came from. Family photographs represented the historic endeavor of the State’s establishment, the creation of the new man, and the building of the society and culture in Israel. Family images were archetypes, and unique characteristics were obscured. It was only at the end of the 1970s that photography in Israel began to deviate from the nationalistic framework, to act in an artistic historical context that was not local, and to search for new models of personal photography.

Images

“Representation of life helps us to preserve it from a second death, spiritual.” (André Bazin)

The invention of photography was meant to fill a human need to accurately reproduce reality and thus attempt to create meaning; photography is a means of capturing a dissenting, impossible-to-freeze reality, yet what the photograph documents is indeed the existing subject. The photographs pave a direct approach to the images and not to reality. They are not a tool of memory but almost a fabrication of memory or its substitute. At one end of the spectrum, the photographs are objective data; at the other end, they are indeed items of psychological “science fiction.”
Photographs have the power to repeat and interpret for us the raw material of everyday experience and even provide us with further information that is normally hidden from our eyes. Photographs define reality anew as a document for research or as an item for display. In photographs, things and events serve new uses, imbuing them with new meaning that goes beyond distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the real and the false, the beneficial and the useless.

Philosophers since Plato have tried to lessen our dependence on images, but the withdrawal of religious and political illusions in the face of humanistic and scientific thinking strengthened the attachment to them. In the 1840s, Ludwig Feuerbach characterized his age as one that “prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence” (The Essence of Christianity, preface to the second edition, 1843). And in the 1960s, Guy Debord wrote: “There, where the real world changes into mere images, mere images become real beings” (The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis no. 18, 1967).Not only is preference given to the image, to the unreal; we are flooded with images, in every place, and in every environment where we find ourselves as well.

Look for Me on Facebook

Today the camera is accessible to everyone. Everyone takes photographs—with digital cameras in different sizes, with cellular phones—and sees the results in real time. The profusion of photographs flows by cable from the camera and spills over into the computer. Files accumulate, collecting images of events and landscapes cataloged by names or dates. Ever since the transition from analog to digital photography, we have been flooded by images, and the album has been compressed onto the hard disk or the CD. Photography has become an everyday tool, not only for holidays or significant occasions in the life of the family. Every moment is recorded and reported on the Internet—where one is. No single image but an abundance of images represent an event etched into memory. Private lives are spread out over the network.

Family albums are becoming communal albums through social networks. We find our photographs and those of others beside reports of happenings, experiences, and gatherings. The photograph album has become instantaneous, common, and public. There is no need to invite a person home to show him family photographs; with the click of a mouse, our family album takes its place on the network.

Family Files

“Among the photographs I found in my father’s house last month, there was one family portrait.… A whole world seems to emerge from this portrait: a distinct time, a distinct place, an indestructible sense of the past. The first time I looked at the picture, I noticed that it had been torn down the middle and then clumsily mended.… I assumed the picture had been torn by accident and thought no more about it.… The second time I looked at it, however, I studied this tear more closely and discovered things I must have been blind to miss before.… And then I realized what was strange about the picture: my grandfather had been cut out of it.… Only his fingertips remained: as if he were trying to crawl back into the picture from some hole deep in time, as if he had been exiled to another dimension.” (Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude)

The exhibition Family Files is almost a paraphrase of the historic exhibition The Family of Man,curated by Edward Steichen in 1955 in an attempt to show that, despite the atrocities of war and the tension among ethnic groups, the human race is, in fact, one family. The exhibition and accompanying catalog had an important function in establishing the photograph’s status as a popular medium, as museum-worthy, and as able to convey human themes. Some felt that photography was enlisted in a manipulative way to express a false humanistic message and restore to man a sense of belonging and a forced “familiarity.” In his Mythologies (1954–56), Roland Barthes dedicates an essay to criticism of the exhibition. This essay, like other essays in the book, rejects the mix of the concepts of nature and history in which ideological distortion is hidden. The myth of “The Family of Man,” Barthes claims, functions in two stages: first, the claim of the existence of infinite differences in the species of man; and second, from this pluralism, oneness is magically extracted.

This exhibition offers a look at contemporary photography from Israel that conducts a dialog with images taken from personal and collective memory. It contains works of artists active in and outside of Israel. One of the main criteria for the exhibition was to choose works in which the photographers have photographed their families.

Each artist works in his or her personal idiom and with the collection of social, cultural, economic, and political images that he or she grew up with. All of the photographers, in their own way, photograph their family and present it. Thus the viewer is exposed to different approaches and intentions. The photographed families constitute a wide range of the quintessence of “family”—invented or imagined, open and ready to test its limits. Some of the artists participating in the exhibition find a source of inspiration in the family album. They return to and respond to it, and after burrowing and searching for truth and insight, a new alternative family album is compiled or invented.
In this exhibition, we see works that were created as a social or cultural protest, or as criticism of an existing situation—not as in the past, where most artistic works maintained the social, religious, or political status quo.

Sixteen artists, sixteen families. Through their families, the artists invite us to contemplate their ideas, their thoughts, and their creativity. It is a visual-anthropological journey, part documentary, part fiction. Some series tell a story of a specific family, and some relate to the family as a universal concept.
In Israel, art is part of a young culture that has an ambivalent attitude toward ancient cultures. As is common today, the society in Israel examines itself and the Other through art. The exhibition indicates images shared by different cultural groups that connect them as community more than territorial, cultural, or political definitions. Here, too, questions are raised and criticism is leveled through the use of language common to the exhibiting artists and to other artists in the world.

The family album and family members act as a reference point for artists to tell a story in their own way and their own language, through a medium that they control. Sometimes the album corrects or creates another way of seeing. The photographs invite the viewer, who chooses to participate by his presence at the exhibition, to take part in the new story.