(Not Only) Family Albums

My thesis explores the family album as an indivisible object within a museum’s collection. Family albums hold both private and public importance for their ability to share collective memories and are valuable resources for scholars and the general public. To realize the inherent value of albums, I argue that we need to treat them as singular objects. Most institutions – such as museums, libraries or archives – treat family albums merely as a group of individual images. In this thesis, I propose an alternative approach: viewing and digitizing the albums as whole objects that are inseparable, lest we distort the narrative shaped in the album. The digitization process advances three services: first, digitization increases access to the album; second, digitization often enables the public to see and understand the album as a whole, maintaining the vision that the album’s maker sought to construct; third, digitization helps preserve the albums. My thesis investigates best practices for family album digitization so that the public can see albums as whole objects. A case study will focus on the Evans family collection from the FamCam at the ROM (accession numbers: 2018.24.1-21), a family collection which comes from a Canadian family that lived in China from 1888, for nearly a 100 years. Twenty-one family albums comprise the collection. The collection portrays the lives of a Western family in China, and provides insight into a century of photography and history. My thesis discusses the methodology, tools, and specific techniques for digitization, while highlighting the complexity of family albums. Though this digitization process may differ from the typical protocols for artifacts, the uniqueness of family albums necessitates genre-specific procedures. My thesis contributes to the emerging literature on family photography in public institutions, and develops an original method for preserving and archiving them digitally.

My thesis explores the family album as an indivisible object within a museum’s collection. Family albums hold both private and public importance for their ability to share collective memories and are valuable resources for scholars and the general public. To realize the inherent value of albums, I argue that we need to treat them as singular objects. Most institutions – such as museums, libraries or archives – treat family albums merely as a group of individual images. In this thesis, I propose an alternative approach: viewing and digitizing the albums as whole objects that are inseparable, lest we distort the narrative shaped in the album. The digitization process advances three services: first, digitization increases access to the album; second, digitization often enables the public to see and understand the album as a whole, maintaining the vision that the album’s maker sought to construct; third, digitization helps preserve the albums. My thesis investigates best practices for family album digitization so that the public can see albums as whole objects. A case study will focus on the Evans family collection from the FamCam at the ROM (accession numbers: 2018.24.1-21), a family collection which comes from a Canadian family that lived in China from 1888, for nearly a 100 years. Twenty-one family albums comprise the collection. The collection portrays the lives of a Western family in China, and provides insight into a century of photography and history. My thesis discusses the methodology, tools, and specific techniques for digitization, while highlighting the complexity of family albums. Though this digitization process may differ from the typical protocols for artifacts, the uniqueness of family albums necessitates genre-specific procedures. My thesis contributes to the emerging literature on family photography in public institutions, and develops an original method for preserving and archiving them digitally.

Reviewed by: Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán Lanie Tankard Gabriela Alemán Family Album: Stories Trans. Dick Cluster & Mary Ellen Fieweger. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2022. 120 pages. THE EIGHT SHORT stories in Family Album live up to the book's title, their names underscoring the concept: Baptism, Summer Vacation, School Trip, Family Outing, Marriage, Honeymoon, Costume Party, Moving Day. Ranging from eight to fifteen pages, these tales offer an astute portrait of author Gabriela Alemán's country, called Ecuador for the equator upon which it resides. Settings bounce from the capital of Quito high in the Andean foothills to the volcanic archipelago of the Galápagos Islands—but also a drilling platform near the Louisiana coast, Puerto Rico, a Brooklyn laundromat, Mexico, and the Faena Theater and Hotel in Buenos Aires. Storylines intrigue: a dying man wants to scuba dive for sunken treasure using Robinson Crusoe's map; memories of a 1967 biddy basketball match drive a man to drink; and John Wayne Bobbitt brings his reconstructed career to Argentina. Murder and mayhem abound along the Ecuadorian Amazon. Born in Brazil, Alemán draws on her journalistic experience as she toys with the short-story form. Clever noir blends fact and fiction with an amusing dash of the gothic, resonating César Aira, Carlos Fonseca, Italo Calvino, or Silvia Moreno-Garcia. "Costume Party" nods to Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño's 2666 ("The Part about Fate"), exploring movies about masked professional prizefighter El Santo, a symbol of justice in Mexico. The narrator believes there was a double in one film shot in Ecuador, terming the series a "house of cards, fragile." [End Page 66] A widow spins one of the strongest yarns in "Marriage" as she discovers her recently deceased husband led a double life. Cleaning out his desk in Quito, she sees he had another wife and children in Machala while funneling money for a construction company—and realizes "the hall of mirrors that my life had been." Each allegorical tale stands effectively on its own. Yet, dig deeper and therein resides Alemán's genius, for she embeds recent events such as the Brazilian Odebrecht scandal's connection to Ecuador or the power dynamics of oil versus Indigenous rights. She tosses hints all over the place. For example, "Moving Day" seems merely a fascinating tale of demonic possession until one ponders a character's name and recognizes what a Portuguese word indicates. Gabriela Alemán's compelling snapshots may be of Ecuador, but their relatives certainly appear in many family albums around the globe. The book is a work of art. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Reviewed by: Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century Samuel C. Florman (bio) Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century. By David P. Billington and David P. Billington Jr. . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xxv+270. $29.95. The editors of Technology and Culture, in a routine memo to reviewers, ask that, if possible, the book under consideration be placed "in the context of relevant scholarship." This seems a perfectly appropriate guideline. Except what is one to do, as in the present case, when the book at hand appears to be totally unique? For starters, Power, Speed, and Form is physically an extraordinary volume: a coffee-table book if you will, square (but not oversized), and chock full of the most extraordinary photos. The illustrations are not artistic as ordinarily defined, being mostly black-and-white archival portraits. But they are wondrous in that, rather than viewing the icons of American technology as we are used to seeing them—elderly, somber, and bewhiskered—we find an array of young, dynamic, bright-eyed creator-heroes. There they are: Edison, Tesla, Steinmetz, Bell, Marconi, De Forest, Ammann, Ford, Chrysler, the Wright brothers, and all the others, looking at us proudly as if posing for a college yearbook, or perhaps as young men of promise in People magazine. (Only George Westinghouse is shown in a traditional portentous image, perhaps because there was no lively, youthful picture readily available.) In addition to the people, there are also stirring photos of objects and places—the Corliss steam engine, a Baldwin locomotive, the Menlo Park laboratory, the Wright glider, an early Pennsylvania oil well, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as it collapses. And finally, as if to underscore the importance of the visible image, photos from the authors' family album—the senior author and his brother at the 1939 New York World's Fair, his grandmother [End Page 635] driving an early automobile, his uncles as boys with a primal radio set. More than eighty illustrations in all, most of them eye-catching and worthy of study. The senior author, a professor at Princeton, is famed for his lectures using slides to help bring technology to life for nontechnical students and to help engineers recognize the connections between their work and the general culture. Now, in partnership with his son, a historian, he has skillfully brought this technique to the printed page. Yet this is not a picture book. It is a serious history of the development of American technology in the period between the year 1876, "the high point of the reciprocating steam engine and the beginning of its decline" (p. 6), and 1939, when the Futurama ride at the New York Word's Fair was both a vision of the future and a portrayal of "a technology and a society already in existence" (p. 3). "Our goal," write the authors, "is to explain to a non-technical audience, and to engineers themselves, the ideas behind historic innovations that are still essential to modern life" (p. xvi). The scope of the book is best defined by the ten chapter headings: "The World's Fairs of 1876 and 1939," "Edison, Westinghouse, and Electric Power," "Bell and the Telephone," "Burton, Houdry, and the Refining of Oil," "Ford, Sloan, and the Automobile," "The Wright Brothers and the Airplane," "Radio: From Hertz to Armstrong," "Ammann and the George Washington Bridge," "Eastwood, Tedesko, and Reinforced Concrete," and "Streamlining: Chrysler and Douglas." Nothing surprising about this list—except for the refining of oil, which is less often celebrated than the other achievements and so, to me, of particular interest—and little to be said about the narrative other than it is very well done. Also, there are some insightful observations about the nature of engineering and how it differs from science. But what is unique, and what, along with the illustrations, makes this book something of a treasure, is the inclusion of more than forty sidebars, each a full-page explication in words, numerical formulas, and splendidly clear diagrams, of the historic innovations discussed in the text. These are apparently the topics covered in the senior author's course...

Diane Arbus: Family Albums. Organized by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, September 2003-December 2005, traveling. Exhibition Curators: Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz. Diane Arbus: Family Albums. Edited by Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 168 pages. $33.00 (paper). Diane Arbus Revelations. October 2003-October 2006, traveling. Exhibition Curators: Sandra S. Philips and Elisabeth Sussman. Diane Arbus Revelations. Edited by Doon Arbus and Elisabeth Sussman. New York: Random House, 2003. 352 pages. $100.00 (cloth). Archives attract us with the possibility that they might contain the forgotten masterpiece or revealing documents overlooked by a previous generation. Until very recently, the career of Diane Arbus has been inoculated against this kind of speculation by an estate that has micromanaged access to and interpretation of her work. Outside of museum collections, Arbus became known through three monographs, Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, and Untitled, sleek, restrained volumes with minimal commentary and large expanses of white space.1 In spite of the limited canon made available by these books, Arbus has become one of the most well known of all modern photographers. Although they may not shock viewers as they did during her first museum show in 1971, her photographs of identical twins, midgets, transvestites, and giants still have the capacity to inspire an unforgettable mixture of discomfort and admiration. Add to this the mystique surrounding Arbus's short life and death by suicide, which framed her as a tragic figure doomed by the intensity of her artistic vision. In fall 2003 Arbus returned to the public eye with the opening of two exhibits, Diane Arbus: Family Albums, curated by Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz, and Diane Arbus Revelations, curated by Sandra S. [End Page 207] Philips and Elisabeth Sussman. Together, they present Arbus's life and work as compelling terrain for scholars of American studies. Not only do Arbus's photographs make visible the underworlds and subcultures that have been central to revisionist histories of the 1950s and 1960s, but her legacy, which has been the subject of ongoing debate, should be of interest to critics concerned with the fate of the arts in contemporary American culture. Arbus's career began in the 1950s as one half of a husband-and-wife team of fashion photographers. When she left the partnership to focus on her own career, she repudiated the aesthetic and social values of the fashion industry. As one of the only women street photographers of her time, she documented the lives of nudists, carnies, strippers, and local eccentrics, and shot portraits of some of the era's most famous personalities. From well-known events and people to those forgotten on the margins of society, her subjects testify to the rapid transformations taking place in midcentury America. Even to those unfamiliar with Arbus's name, her distinctive style is recognizable: the snapshot aesthetic; the large, square format; and the signature uneven black border would have a profound influence on the formal features of modern photography. And many who are unfamiliar with the work are aware of the legend of Diane Arbus. Like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, other famous suicidal women artists of her generation, Arbus rose to posthumous celebrity based as much on the mythology surrounding her life as on the merits of her photography. The notorious silence of those managing her estate only compounded the fascination of fans and critics, who tended either to focus explicitly on formal analysis of Arbus's published work or to posit biographical connections between the photographs and the artist's own psychological turmoil. The long silence was finally broken by Family Albums and Revelations, the first major exhibits of Arbus's photography since a 1972 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Each is accompanied by a book of photographs containing new essays about her life and work. Almost diametrically opposed in scope and intention...

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: A City in Transition 2. The Knife of the Depression 3. Family Album, 1920s and 1930s 4. The New Deal City 5. Homefront 6. Family Album, World War II 7. A Last Hurrah 8. The Enduring Rowhouse City 9. Family Album, 1945-1960 10. Metropolis Reshaped 11. The Spirit of the 1950s Sources Index

<p>This thesis uses Toronto artist Max Dean's performance Max Dean: Album, produced in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario, as a case study to investigate the complex issues involved in the display and recirculation of private family albums in the public space of the art gallery.</p> <p>A survey of the critical literature that addresses the placement of vernacularobjects such as family albums and snapshots in the art gallery functions as a preamble to a series of interviews done with scholars, academics and curators in the fields of photography and art history. Drawing on the results of these interviews, this paper examines the challenges that arise when family albums are publicly displayed and exhibited. Terry Barrett's methodology of investigating the context of photographs is considered and applied to family albums and to Dean's Album project, analyzing how his public performance provides a creative solution to the issues raised. </p>

<p>This thesis uses Toronto artist Max Dean's performance Max Dean: Album, produced in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario, as a case study to investigate the complex issues involved in the display and recirculation of private family albums in the public space of the art gallery.</p> <p>A survey of the critical literature that addresses the placement of vernacularobjects such as family albums and snapshots in the art gallery functions as a preamble to a series of interviews done with scholars, academics and curators in the fields of photography and art history. Drawing on the results of these interviews, this paper examines the challenges that arise when family albums are publicly displayed and exhibited. Terry Barrett's methodology of investigating the context of photographs is considered and applied to family albums and to Dean's Album project, analyzing how his public performance provides a creative solution to the issues raised. </p>

This essay describes an investigation into a family photographic archive that belonged to my grandparents and represent a period in Portugal’s past (1940–1975) scarred by one of the longest dictatorships in history. The research carries out an ‘iconographic’ analysis of the photographs in the family albums and on how these were influenced by the consistent and highly visual propaganda of the New State regime (1933–1974). It demonstrates how the iconography of this visual propaganda embedded itself into the family album, specifically regarding its propaganda strategy and its ideology and politics towards women. Later these findings were explored through performance photography, creating a photographic body of work. Focusing mostly on the figure of my grandmother and exploring pose and gesture, which were subsequently re-performed for the camera. The information contained within the archive images is re-written within the performance images. Keywords: photography and performative, visual propaganda, dictatorship, archive, visualization of the role of women

Susana de Sousa Dias’s cinematic reframing of mugshots from the archive of Portugal’s former political police, the PIDE, represented a unique intermedial contribution to the country’s memory boom of the 2000s and 2010s. In her 2017 documentary, Luz Obscura, three surviving children of Octávio Pato (1925–1999), an emblematic leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, narrate their traumatic memories of a clandestine childhood overshadowed by surveillance, ruptured family ties and imprisonment. The pathos of the narrators’ recollections is enhanced by the intercutting of repressive archival portraits and fragmented images of detained parents and children, which, as an ensemble, evokes a disturbing ‘family album’. In this article, I consider the extent to which Sousa Dias’s film encourages the viewer to empathize with the individualized pain of each narrator while simultaneously framing the ‘carceral’ family album as a trope for a recuperated anti-fascist memory and, ultimately, as a contribution to a Deleuzian ‘world memory’ of political resistance.

According to the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage (Unesco 2003), from the point of view on Social Heritage, the Family Photo, and by extension Family Albums, play a particular significant role. In particular, Family Albums are a specific referent point for conservation, transmission and development of a community Social Heritage. At the same time, Family Album can be considered “places” of the Italian memory and places of transmission between public and private, because the photography, since its debut, is a public space, as if to say: posing is already being in public. Amateurs photographs and professional photographs offer a chance to see a visual history of Italy and so a visual history of dominant ideologies, perceptual and cultural models of Italian life. In this sense, with Family Album we can analyzed the continuous interweaving between the idea of history and history of ideological, economic and political thinking, factors influencing consumers, tastes change and the impact of scientific progress. Specifically, Family photo is a new source for the study of Italian family’s history, that is “The True Homeland of the Italian” and so the institution on which the national identity is found (Ginsborg 2001).

Family Album follows a young university student assisting a journalist in documenting a glass workers' strike in Istanbul's Paşabahçe neighborhood during the summer of 1999. Immersed in the atmosphere of solidarity and collective struggle, she accompanies the journalist to interview Murat, a key strike organizer, in his shanty house overlooking the Bosporus. What begins as a celebration of working‐class resistance takes an unexpected turn when Murat shares his family album. Through this intimate domestic encounter, the narrative explores the complex intersections of class solidarity, state violence, and necropolitics in Turkey. The story examines the ethical dilemmas faced by those who document social movements when confronted with contradictions that challenge simplistic narratives of working‐class struggle.

Family albums are filled with photographs celebrating the happy times. These represent the high points in life, such as birthdays, holidays, and weddings as well as ordinary moments of domestic life. But what of more difficult images? Rarely included in the family album are photographs of funerals, deaths, and expressions of grief. Consequently, the focus of this article is a private collection of difficult photographs, hidden from view and left out of the family archive; the images unmistakably depict a family deep in mourning. Taken in 1975 at a funeral and burial, the family is pictured grieving their loss in an unusually public way. These images offer a rare opportunity to examine the representation of intimate and difficult emotions in private photographs, while asking questions about the function of the family archive. Using Jacques Derrida’s reflections on death, mourning, and the archive, as well as Roland Barthes’ observations in Camera Lucida, I have argued for difficult images to be included and shared in the family album. Here I maintain that difficult images depicting difficult emotions offer an opportunity to enhance photography’s storytelling capacity in the inter-generational experience of family. This examination is further contextualized alongside photography’s longstanding connection to death.

The paper presents the idea of initiating work on the patient’s script with the use of their family album. It is done during five consecutive stages similar to the stages in narrative therapy. The in- troductory stage serves as a preparation for using the album, the next stage allows for the identifi- cation of the persons in the photographs, while during the third one patients compare the photo- graphs in the album and look for significant moments in their biographies. In the fourth stage an alternative version of events from the patients’ past is created, and the last one should lead to redecisions concerning resolutions made in early childhood. Due to the advancement of digital photography, it might be the last moment when a family album in its traditional form can aid work on the script in therapy.

Coming Undone Courtney Morgan (bio) Family Album Jason Snyder Jaded Ibis Press www.jadedibispress.com 426 Pages; Print, $19.99 More than a coming-of-age story, Family Album, Jason Snyder’s impressive debut novel, is a story of coming undone, of being unraveled just at the point an identity should begin to coalesce. The novel is a bildungsroman in a twisted looking glass world, where rather than discovering and creating himself as he progresses into adolescence, twelve-year-old Matthew is instead dissected and digested by a sickly cocktail of manipulation, deprecation, abandonment, and “a more or less permanent condition of atmospheric instability.” But from beneath the battering of psychological abuse, a voice, a self, scratches at the surface, strains to claw its way through. The narrative follows Matthew’s family as they attempt to adopt a second child, but it ultimately is the story of the protagonist’s mental disintegration. The weight of his parents’s neuroses shoved upon his back, Matthew cripples under his own skin, searching desperately and destructively for a way out. And though Matthew’s perspective struggles to surface, and once in a few dozen pages an “I” emerges, mostly he is beaten back down beneath the cacophony of pathological conversations and vile voices that threaten to devour him. True to its name, Family Album is structured like a scrapbook; readers flip through photographs—descriptive images of a moment in time—snippets of dialogue, and excerpts of Matthew’s schoolwork. These found vignettes of everyday life alternate around what is ultimately the heart of the novel: jumbled pages of Matthew’s perspective, made up primarily of found language—other people’s voices, regurgitated phrases of dialogue—peppered with interruptions by Matthew’s psyche. In his tangled interiority, thoughts begin but never finish, dissolving into one another, into someone else’s voice, swallowing meaning before it can complete, washing out any “Matthew” at all: Believe me son there is command beneath every word I speak. And to become someone unrecognizable not the son I deserve to mother a lost fucking cause what happened to you used to be such a good boy such a joy false reality to know you are an appendage to the image better shape up become what I demand of you son something wicked something ill in the mirror reflect every expression he wants you to wear to control the dark middle of the night humming within me. Matthew’s interjections into his own internal monologue are primarily in the second person, further erasing him and pushing his personhood to the margins, reinforcing the psychological rift, which tears deeper as the novel progresses. In these bits—these fragments of the roiling molten core of both Matthew and the narrative itself—we see Matthew splinter. The innovative structure of the novel gives readers a unique vantage point. From the outside we watch Matthew self-destruct—explode and burn [End Page 23] things, break windows, self-mutilate—while on the inside we participate in the battle raging between a fractured multiplicity of voices. And as readers we aren’t just allowed to witness; we are forced inside his psyche, asked to decode the language, to create solidity out of the spinning chaos, to untangle the breakdown of thought as we struggle, like Matthew, for coherence. “And to make a current within these thoughts find a place for yourself inside your mind the cold violence between them is a signal that sparks its own language you must recognize to survive.” The novel, like its protagonist, creates its own language in order to restructure the way that thought is built and to capture the winding trails through which Matthew comes to understand himself and the world around him. And not only to understand, but to constitute himself. One recurring thought that repeats throughout his sections, “And to wonder where the words lie down inside you,” speaks to the way the words create him, the way he is built of bone and skin and syllable, the way he can never extricate himself from the language swimming around and inside him—despite the fact that so few of the words belong to him. And because...