FAMILY ALBUM

Family photographs are among the primary ways we encounter photography. We take family pictures, pose for them, share them, and return to them. These images are lenses into our interior worlds. This exhibition features the work of artists of color who examine themselves and history through the visual language of family photographs.

Some mine their personal archives. Some challenge the aesthetic conventions of snapshots. Some works feature scenes of tranquility and love, while others warn that the impact of segregation laws, police brutality, and environmental racism, persist in communities of color today.

Dannielle Bowman and Janna Ireland revel in the beauty of everyday life through depictions of their communities. Ireland’s photographs blur distinctions between confession and fiction, documentation and performance. Photographing her family inhabiting an apparent California wonderland, she poses as wife and mother interrogating how familial roles are performed for the camera. Carlee Fernandez and Hank Willis Thomas also use performance as a strategy, assuming the dress and posture of their parents to illustrate their connection to them. Star Montana and Sandra de La Loza manipulate their own family pictures to destabilize time and memory. The historic self-portrait by Lyle Ashton Harris and Renee Cox, in which the artists present themselves in drag, questions who is allowed to embody the American family.

Family photographs reveal the political, physical and emotional aspects of home. Photography, the medium that simulates seeing, has a special ability to connect us with the sensations of life and memories of loved ones.

IMAGE: Sandra de la Loza
‍Los Angeles, b. 1968
‍Mother and Child, 2003
From the series Mi casa es su casa
Inkjet print
Purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund