Abstract
This thesis examines the visual construction of family in the previously unknown personal album of Cyril J. Brown in the Royal Ontario Museum’s South Asian photography collection. Beginning with retrieving the object’s personal history and tracing its links to the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the crossover in photographic content between Brown’s personal album and the Kautz Family YMCA Archive at the University of Minnesota is examined. In doing so, I argue that family photography and institutional forms of image making are interconnected through the use of familial photographic tropes and pictorialist techniques which are common to both collections. Finally, concluding with a reflection on the significance of Brown’s album for the genre of family photography.
Highlights
Many museum collections contain “orphaned” photos, or family albums that have been separated from their family history
218 Ibid, page 99 closer in development to primitive man.219. Indian schoolgirls, such as the ones depicted here, with their purportedly sentimental and controllable nature—according to this concept of Christian nurturing—made them a favourite subject for pictorialist study, an art form characterized by soft focus and associated with allegory and celebrations of nature, features that were considered “feminine.”220 Recapitulation theory, a belief that expounded on romantic ideals, explains the motivation for a composition of this kind, and accounts for why girls rather than boys would be featured as photographic subjects for men like Brown and Archer
Marianne Hirsch states: “because of their conventional nature and the monocular len’s ideological effect, family photographs can reveal the operation of the familial gaze
Summary
Many museum collections contain “orphaned” photos, or family albums that have been separated from their family history. My thesis focuses on the construction of ideal white Christian masculinity through the intersecting familial discourses of YMCA visual culture and Brown and Archer’s personal albums.. For example, the fact that Mrs Jessop is included within the photograph captioned 1911 Residents YMCA Calcutta (Fig.2), the same photograph that is within the YMCA archive Her presence suggests that we must address the role of women, marginalized, in relation to the YMCA’s larger male-dominated visual culture. “Reclaiming Savages in ‘Darkest England’ and ‘Darkest India’: The Salvation Army as Transnational Agent of Civilizing Mission” in Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial India: From Improvement to Development, edited by Carey Anthony Watt and Michael Mann (New York: Anthem Press, 2011) Fischer-Tinè is currently working on a monograph of the history of the YMCA in India. I will conclude by reflecting on Brown’s album and its significance for the field of family photography and its significance to the growing scholarship on the YMCA’s India branches and in particular its contribution to the visual culture of colonial India
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