Family Romance

Family Romance is an ongoing project appropriating the family album to examine photography's relationship with memory, mis-remembering, and myth-making.

A photograph claims to materialise memory as something that can be possessed, suggesting that a moment may be lost without one. But even outside of this implied nostalgic loss, the intentioned photographic act itself mediates what is to be preserved and what is not. In this sense, photography may be as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. This notion preoccupies me as I work with my family albums. Throughout the thousands of photographs, I observe what Marianne Hirsch calls the familial gaze – the scripted way in which a family sees and presents itself – and in the context of my family’s history, I spectate the performance of family and the meditation between what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. I acknowledge the familial myth that these images try to create but make cuts through it with questions. Could these photographs have served as facilitators of the work of my father’s memory, which was impaired with early-onset Alzheimer’s? Can they serve as objects of my memory of him, as the daughter of a polygamous father’s second family? I look for suggestions and patterns in the photographs and try to make new meanings of them with my own gestures. 

The documentation of the first few years of our nuclear family is idyllic and insistent – a perfect family journeying through picturesque mountains, valleys, and rivers, with each scene photographed multiple times. I entertain both the familial gaze and the materialisation of memory in these photographs, constructing montages to extend an image beyond its frame in an attempt to serve my father’s memory better. As the maker of most of the family photographs, his own presence within the album is sparse. I collect the countable photographs of him and compile them into a family album. Deconstructing his image to intervene in my own memory of him, I highlight the Vedic gemology rings on his fingers to transform them into symbols of the fortunes they are supposed to bring the wearer – wealth, power, and a happy family life. In the background of other family photographs, I locate his wives in the numerous female figurines on display in the house and follow them as they move across our homes through the decades; isolating them within their domestic spaces to confront the familial gaze.