VAL WILLIAMS - Who's looking at the Family

Val Williams - Who's looking at the family

There was an exhibition of a large collection of family portraiture at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1994. Val Williams helped select the photographic art for it and she wrote a book called ‘Who's looking at the family?’ The book traces the history of family portrait images and includes such images as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant mother (1936) and a series of June and Hilda Thompson’s photos of children (1958). She says that from the beginning of photography the family has been a ‘focus of attention’. Most families create memories of birthdays, weddings and holidays through their snapshots. The snapshots create a favourable reflection of domestic life. However family photos can make the world more or less real.

In one of the chapters, Nearly Narrative; Some Domestic Stories, she talks about the photographers who construct family stories with photographs of real lives and do not pretend to be objective. This is similar to the way story tellers have a point of view and are generally partial. She says ‘the families they have photographed have entered a public arena, giving us, the audience an opportunity to observe, to make comment, to judge and compare’.

Tina Barney says of her family portraits that: ‘the environment in which she photographed her subjects was as revealing as the expressions on their faces—and, in some cases, more revealing’.