Family – Context and Narrative

Following the feedback I received from my tutor, I decided to rework both my selection of images for this assignment and the way I presented them.

I decided that a more uniform presentation would avoid breaking the series and allow me to concentrate more closely on particular aspects of the images. I narrowed my set of artefacts to just the books I have in my possession from one line of my family—all of which are related to Christian worship in the Church of England. Furthermore, each book carries an inscription with either the name of my grandfather or my great-grandmother and, in some cases their names in their own handwriting.

I re-shot the assignment with a clearer sense of purpose and did my best to maintain consistency of approach: two shots of each book (closed and opened to the inscription page), no ruler for scale (I decided that the effort to be clinical or ‘archaeological’ was a bit forced), and a plain white background with even lighting. This last consideration has turned out to be more difficult than I thought it might—I’ve done my best to maintain a consistent white balance across the images, but it is not quite perfect.

In sum, the little collection of devotional books gives a glimpse into one aspect of the childhoods of two family members. I do not know if they continued church attendance into adulthood. It’s not a lot on which to build an understanding of a branch of the family: some books that suggest a degree of religious observance in youth, some handwriting, a surname, place names from the island my family left in the mid-1960s. In this sense, I think that the shots respond to the brief for Assignment 2 (photographing the unseen) by being suggestive rather than conclusive about family origins and identity.

Still, the connections are there if I choose to make them, as I see things that continue to be important to me: books, history, faith and place. Other viewers will almost certainly imagine other “unseens” in response to the series.

My work covers a number of the “unseens” that I identified as I began to think about this assignment: the past, the dead, missing people and secrets. Every family has its share of those and mine is no different. I know very little about my father’s branch of the family so, over the last few years, I have begun to unearth what I can through official records and archives in the UK. If it were left only to the physical evidence left to me—that is, the few objects in my possession—I would know very little about the people who came before me.

I present images of those objects here in the way that a museum or archive might, described simply and following archival technique (Online Museum Training – Photographing Collection Items. [s.d.]). I have done this because that is how I have come to read the pieces: for me, they are akin to museum artefacts in that they are from the past, are on display and are divorced from their original context. Individually, they might be read as objets trouvés, “objects or products with non-art functions that are placed into an art context and made part of an artwork” (History of the Found Object in Art [s.d.]).

Taken together, however, the objects form a collection that I try to fit with some difficulty and much imagination into a narrative about the people who owned them. In my mind, they hint at aspects of the daily lives of my paternal grandfather, grandmother and great-grandmother over a period of some 60 years, all before I was born. Without more detail and context, however, I realise that any interpretation I make contains a lot of projection and speculation.

And that is interesting to me. If I as a direct descendant am not able to tease out much of the context and narrative of these pieces, viewers with no personal connection are free to construct an even broader range of interpretations. We might all be able to view the pieces as signs, but it is unlikely we would all agree on what they signify (Hall, 2007, p.10). Would others’ narratives about the lives of my unseen family be any more or less valid than mine?

How would I know? Would it matter?