Disturbing Fine Memories? An empirical study of young people's camphone family pictures

Abstract

Being one of the most ritualised and coded images we have, the family photo has maintained its status and privilege as the visual, self-acclaimed collective family heirloom throughout the decades. In spite of the fact that new family forms have challenged the conventional nuclear family structure and function, the family picture has predominantly remained the same: smiling children, parents, uncles and aunts at unmistakably happy moments. Today, all Norwegian teenagers have their own camera telephone, which facilitates a multiplicity of ways that family narratives can be maintained, expanded and perpetuated. Parents are no longer the sole editors and custodians of the family's visual memories. As young people demand a place as historiographers and intervene in the mediation of family memories and ideologies, the practice of the presentation of the family, its social function and significance are undergoing changes. Based on analysis of in-depth interviews with twenty-three Norwegian teenagers and a sample of their camphone family pictures, this article examines how camphone family pictures make possible new articulations of the family, articulations that perhaps are more in accordance with the changes that already are underway in the functions of families. In terms of these phenomena the article discusses how new technologies of the self affect conventions and understandings of the family and how “new” and plural family pictures, filed in each individual's private digital archives, affect the coming family narratives.