fotos

In approaching my contribution to this assignment, I started thinking about “my family” in two ways: the family setting I grew up in (my parents and siblings), and the family I have now (my wife and kids). These are not mutually exclusive, but do represent a shift between two kinds of domestic contexts or definitions of “family.” That is, my folks and sisters have become “extended” family to my kids, and my extended family has grown via my in-laws. As such, I realized that I grew up thinking about family as a quite small unit that included: parents, sisters, grandparents. Aunts, uncles, cousins—these were abstractions that did not necessarily enter our representations of ourselves, photographically or otherwise.

This photo represents an updated version of a scene that I experienced every year of my life on Christmas morning; I and my sisters (as they were added the family) would stand in a particular hallway in my parent’s house, with the tree and packages just out of our sight. My dad took a photo of us, and then we ran out into the living room to begin tearing through wrapping paper and such. In this shot, however, we are in my house, where my wife and I successfully hosted the winter holidays for the first time ever (my dad is reluctant to let go of family traditions…which in this case involves all of his “kids” being in his house during Christmas!). Here he snaps a photo of his three grandchildren (my kids are the two girls sitting down) in the equivalent of the hallway from my youth (unfortunately I do not have access to one of these historical snaps to post here…).

This is my version of the same photo:

My dad always took the photos in our family, and I guess I’ve inherited that “tradition” of domestic documentation in many ways. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mother handle a camera (comfortably, at least), and while my wife takes photos (she’s a folklorist, after all) I definitely dominate the pictorial presentation of our crew (though the balance is shifting with the advent of a dual-iPhone house). I’ve been shooting photos since high-school, and studied photography in college as well as afterwards. Being an ethnographer, the camera has been an important part of my field research over the years, and I see it as being seamlessly part of my non-ethnographic life as well. What’s interesting about all of this in light of family and representation is the ways in which the shift to digital has impacted the way we look at our photos. The stuffed shoebox or mended album has given way to the iPad, Flickr, digital frame (though I’ve never really understood these…), or the phone. My kids can access photos in such different ways than I could, and there is a nostalgia (for me, at least) connected to digging into the drawer of photo albums at my parents house that must be quite distinct from that my kids have flicking through images of them and their lives on an iPad.

So, back to the Christmas photo. It’s become iconic in my family, to the point that we did try to recreate it this year even though Christmas happened in a spot other than the house I grew up in—the site of 98% of these images in my family’s history (there were two or three years we did not celebrate Christmas at my folks’ house…). My sisters and I would consistently make fun of my dad as he lined us up for the photo (this became rampant as we all moved into college-age, young adulthood), and we joke about it to this day. No special symbols in the photos beyond pajamas and, eventually, coffee cups. Funny faces or smirks would appear sometimes, though discouraged by pops. As such, the photo-as-icon is symbolic of itself and of the family gathering around the holidays. We’ve often talked about scanning all of these (37 years worth!) for my dad as a gift one year, which would be quite fascinating to look at, and would embed a historical value in the tradition by gathering them all in one place, I suppose. Maybe this year is the year for that…

food

I don’t recall a lot of photos like this from my youth, but I like to take them in order to document big family meals. This is from the same Christmas discussed above, and represents a food tradition rather than a particular recipe. It’s a tradition that my wife and I have developed as our own over the past several years, and involves building a Christmas Day dinner from a fancy food magazine. While out shopping or enjoying that brief respite between the end of fall term and the start of holiday chaos, we grad a seasonal food magazine and choose several recipes to try out. In this way, we end up making different dishes every year, based on whatever the food writers and holiday consultants have determined is “it” that year. We have fun pushing beyond our culinary comfort zone (we both love to cook and try out different things, so this is not as dramatic as it sounds…), and fun sharing our experiments with family and friends. It’s a young tradition at this point, but one that I look forward to and that I hope continues to evolve as our kids become more of a presence in the kitchen!