In their new book, Family Photography Now, Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren showcase innovative photographers who change the way we think about the humble family snap
The Acason Family from the Alt. Family Portraits Photograph: Pat Pope
Pat Pope
You need a sense of humour to commission one of Pat Pope’s Alt.Family Portraits. Even the most congenial family can end up looking like the cast of a television drama. Arranged in a dark space, and backlit to dramatic effect, Pope styles his sitters with a heavy dose of gothic glamour and a gentle touch of menace. “The idea is to get as far away from the conventional high street family portrait as possible. I don’t let people smile. I tell them to look blank.”
Pope’s early career was as a music photographer. He photographed David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Radiohead and Suede. “Then the work dried up and there was no more travelling around the world staying in hotels with everything paid for! So I left London and moved home to the countryside, and turned my hand to wedding and family portraiture to make ends meet.”
The idea for his Alt.Family Portraits came from photographing local rock bands. They often asked for the kind of moody group shot beloved by musicians, but rarely had the budget to create it. Pope found a way to create the effect without the need for hundreds of spotlights and a large supporting crew. He would compose shot with all the band members present marking out the exact positions of their feet, then photograph each member of the band one by one, and assemble the separate images into a final composite in Photoshop.
“It turned out to be a great strategy for working with families. Kids find it hard to keep still for long, and it’s almost impossible to get everyone in a family to the same instructions at the same time. This way, I get to work one to one with each family member, until I have a final shot they are happy with.”
Sarker Protick’s portrait of his grandparents, John and Prova
Sarker Protick
Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick grew up knowing his grandparents, John and Prova, as strong, hard-working people, whose work took them all around the country. “As they got older and became confined mostly to their apartment, I visited them often. But the pace of our lives had become so different, and sometimes I struggled to know what to talk about. I started making photographs as a different way to spend time with them. They loved it. So did I. The experience of photography gave us much more than just photographs.”
This photograph of John and Prova embracing in bed is a particularly poignant one for their grandson. “By that time, their declining health meant they slept in separate beds, and they were only rarely able to be physically close. I moved their beds together to set the picture up. It is the last photograph ever taken of them together. After Prova died, John asked me to print a copy of it for him to put up in their apartment.”
In a small village in the south west of France, Alain Laboile has been photographing his six children Eliott, Olyana, Luna, Merlin, Dune, and Nil almost everyday since 2004. “We think of ourselves as living at the edge of the world in a universe of our own.”
He documents them climbing trees and making dens, swinging from ropes and chasing shadows. They dress up and play with imaginary friends, they undress, have water fights and smother themselves with mud. They play endless games of hide and seek, do piggy-back and wheelbarrow races, make broomsticks and wings from branches, attempt to fly and fall about laughing when they fail. They collect frogs and lizards, chase birds and cats. They even bring a deer to live with them in the house for a few weeks.
No doubt they have the same show-downs over household chores and homework that all children do and, between the six of them, they surely experience regular eruptions of sibling rivalry, but Laboile doesn’t show us any of that. His focus on innocent, carefree play has shaped one of the most idyllic documents of childhood in the history of photography.
Although his instinct for lighting and framing are masterful, Laboile claims to have little interest in the technical aspects of the medium. “If there is emotion in the picture that’s good, even if it is a bit blurred or poorly framed. Accuracy is not the important thing. I want to capture the feeling of the moment. My photography is like a daily diary. I don’t have any influences and I try to stay away from photographic culture. I make pictures as a memory for my children.”
Fan Shi San’s composite photographs explore the impact of China’s one-child policy on the identity of his generation. “Nearly every child born in urban China between 1978 and 2013, including myself, is an only child. We are the loneliest generation in China’s history. Many of us entertained ourselves by integrating alter-egos into our lives as a substitute for the siblings we never had.”
He photographs the same model in two different poses and then photoshops them together to create an imaginary twin scenario. When Shi San started uploading the photographs to Douban, a Chinese social networking site, in 2010, they immediately struck a chord. One girl wrote to the photographer, explaining: “I am always talking to myself, as if I am two people at the same time. I know so many others who also feel the same. It’s as if my heart has been split, as if I am both weak and strong weak and strong, both boy and girl, both self-conscious and self-obsessed.”
Timothy Archibald’s portrait of his son, Eli, from the series Echolilia.
Timothy Archibald
By the time his son Eli was a toddler, it was clear to Timothy Archibald, a successful commercial photographer, that something was different about him. “School was a problem, babysitters had problems, teachers had questions, and we were at a loss as to why he was so hard to raise.“
In an attempt to understand complexities of Eli’s inner life, and to pull some creative opportunity out of a situation whose challenges were all-consuming, Archibald started to photograph his son. “I suppose I thought there was some hope that I’d point the camera at the problem, then take the photographs to the doctor, get a pill and that would solve it all.”
The project opened up a new level of father-son communication. “Eli wanted to be involved. He wanted to come up with ideas. He wanted to look through the camera and make suggestions. He’d create a curious performance and I’d find the light to photograph him in. Soon we had a pattern, a map. This ended up being the project that changed photography for me.”
The Lim family (Connecticut, Telok Kurau) from the series Being Together by John Clang.
John Clang
John Clang explores how modern technology can bring together families which, like his own, are spread all over the world. This photograph shows two branches of the Lim family in Connecticut, USA and Telok Kurau, Singapore, connected by Skype. “The idea for using Skype projection first came from a desire to make portrait of my own family that was true to the reality of our circumstances. It developed into a series of works exploring Singaporean families of various races and ethnicities grappling with the impact of diaspora. I always photograph both parts of each family live, but co-ordinating the shoots across multiple time zones can be tricky and often reveals a lot of tension.
It’s sad to see how families can become separated not only through diaspora but as a result of the hecticness of our lifestyles. While we are making the photograph, people are not usually able to wrap their minds around how it will end up. Sometimes they burst into tears on seeing the final images.”
Donna Rosser’s picture of her mother-in-law Irene’s most prized possession, her family in a collection of miniature portraits hung on a wire tree.
Donna Rosser
American photographer Donna Rosser’s picture of a table top ornament made from more than 20 miniature framed portraits of different family members, beautifully captures the comfort and reassurance
photographs can offer us at moments of vulnerability. “I took it in my mother-in-law Irene’s home on our last visit prior to her move to an assisted living situation,” Rosser says. “The portrait charms on the tree are family – my family and children, my husband’s siblings and children and small angel charms collected by my mother-in-law.
My father-in-law, who is rather crafty, made the tree by twisting wire and creating a flat, heavy base. It reminds me how much she valued family even if we were not close to her geographically. We were always in her thoughts.”
Martine Fougeron’s Teen Tribe: A world with two sons.
Martine Fougeron
Teen Tribe is a portrait of Martine Fougeron’s sons, Nicholas and Adrien, and a circle of close friends made over a 10-year period. Documenting the boys as they observed and experimented with their changing bodies, and formed and struggled with new friendships and romances, Fougeron had to tread a fine line between curiosity and respectful distance. “Most photographers portray adolescents as outsiders with a despairing outlook on their world and the world around them. This was not the perception I had of my sons’ lives. Photographing my sons really helped to strengthen our bond It helped me to understand far more than I would otherwise have about the incredible emotional, creative and sexual changes they were doing through. I didn’t want them to feel stalked by my camera. I would often photograph them at night, when I could be a bit more invisible. I’d stay perhaps 20 minutes at a party, then make myself scarce. They needed to know I wasn’t going to hang out with them all night!”
Philip Toledano’s portrait of his daughter from the series The Reluctant Father.
Philip Toledano
Conceptual photographer Phillip Toledano never imagined that photographs of his family might become his best known work. After his mother’s death in 2006, it fell to him as the only child to care for his ageing father. Fearful of forgetting the life they shared together during these twilight years, he started a photoblog, Days With My Father. “I made the photographs for myself and didn’t think anyone else would have any interest in them. But when the blog went up, a magical thing happened. I started getting thousands of emails. People told me how moved they were by it, how it had encouraged them to get in touch with their own parents, and helped them see the importance of saying goodbye. It was extraordinary how much it seemed to touch people.”
Four months after his father died, Toledano’s daughter Loulou was born. “I was never particularly interested in having kids and I think it’s fair to say that I was neither ready, nor vastly enthused when she was born.” His early photographs of Loulou show a screaming, scrunched and alien-like newborn. But there’s no accounting for the power of parental love, and this reluctant father soon found himself taking the kind of baby photos he swore he’d never indulge in: “It’s really quite embarassing. When I meet other parents, I lunge for the iPhone. I can’t wait to bore people. “Look, I know you don’t like baby pictures, but Loulou is different!” I’ve become that sad statistic, the proud father.”
There is also a 40-week digital participation project led by The Photographers’ Gallery, which invites the public to present a personal image of what family life means today. Find out more at familyphotographynow.net
