To preserve, to discuss and to reply. Readings and fissures of the family album

Abstract

Photography is capable, not of stopping time, but of retaining snapshots so that we don’t have to keep them only in memory. It is especially in family photography in which it becomes a mooring that allows us to bear the anguish of the course of time. The distance between the photographic event and the photographic representation empowers family photography, generating a discourse fuelled by nostalgia for the past, that is: the experience of loss. In this article we analyse photographic works in which the re-elaboration that comes from interpreting family albums creates an artistic act of reply, conversation or rewriting of what the family album thought to have fixed. In the case of family albums —this is our hypothesis— re-reading allows an act of reinterpretation and questioning of the family history and the identifications it promotes. In order to delve into this reading of family photography, we will trace a path based on the analysis of paradigmatic cases that take personal photography and the family album to question their internal power structures from a semiotic methodology (Marzal, 2007) that allows us to read the image as significant materiality where the author’s enunciation is written. We will approach the family photo album as a narrative, as propaganda, as a shapeless signifier, as a construction of identifications, as a fetish object and, in the post-photographic paradigm, also as a discourse of extimacy which is an act of contestation that allows generational conversations, a reflection on the politics of bodies, ideals, objects and the subjective marks of time.