Family as Place: Family Photograph Albums and the Domestication of Public and Private Space

Abstract

In this chapter the author combines historical, autobiographical and interpretive approaches in an effort to achieve a deeper contextual understanding of family photographs. She shows how the private space of the family may be preserved in the private space of the album, and how the family as place may be constituted through a visual dialogue between private and public discourses of space. The family photograph album is a sophisticated ideological device which is attracting increasing scholarly attention in a variety of disciplines. Emphasizing that family photographs are integral to the ideology of the modern family, Pierre Bourdieu said that the practice of photography functions to solemnize and immortalize ‘the high points of family life’ and to reinforce ‘the integration of the family group by reasserting the sense that it has both of itself and of its unity’. The private narratives of family albums have been influenced by national narratives of the nineteenth century in Britain and its colonies.