Documenting the Family

This six-session, six-month course is designed for students who’re at least advanced beginners, actively photographing their families or intending to begin soon. Each session will include critiques of students’ work, as well as a lecture that’ll feature examples from books and portfolios created by other family photographers.

Our families are shaped by exterior forces – the economy, the quality of local education, the availability of affordable housing––as well as by interior ones: the mental and physical health of each member, the accumulation of grievance or favor over time, the ebb and flow of power dynamics. Can such gravitational forces be photographed? Certainly, we can make evidentiary “documents” of daily life in our homes: birthday parties, dinnertime, homework. When we gather and sequence twenty or thirty of those images, telling a story about our families, will we present the narrative of a charming tribe, struggling onward and upward together, or will a more ambivalent picture emerge? The diversity of tone and mood in such storytelling is on display everywhere in literature, film, theater and, increasingly, photography books themselves. Family life, in brighter or darker shades, is an essential part of our cultural, artistic dialogue.

This six-session, six-month course is designed for students who’re at least advanced beginners, actively photographing their families or intending to begin soon. Each session will include critiques of students’ work, as well as a lecture that’ll feature examples from books and portfolios created by other family photographers.

Thomas Alleman, the course instructor, photographed his own family throughout the 1980’s. He’s currently finishing a memoir of those years, illustrated by 80 images. He’ll discuss that work, along with the family projects of several contemporary photographers. In those discussions, students will encounter a wide diversity of subject matter, point-of-view and presentation: Some photographers employ irony or wry humor in their work, others a forensic, deadpan factuality, and still others use light and composition to give a sense of foreboding or unease. Some focus on single dramatic aspects of the larger narrative––an illness, a moment of crisis or achievement––and a few others probe deeply into psychology, history, character, and the ravages of time.

The ongoing photographic act is, of course, the central business of this class: students must actively shoot a family project during our six-month schedule, which is designed to give them time to develop a comprehensive portfolio. Editing, which is certainly essential to that storytelling process, will be discussed at length and practiced often. Often, words contribute powerfully to such projects––whether they’re written as memoir by the photographer or spoken by subjects in interviews, or jotted as notes or copied from historic documents. We’ll spend time studying the use of such tools and techniques.