The crucial importance of the family as an institution in maintaining the State is agreed upon by radical feminists and government ministers alike. Official recognition of its role was revealed in the proposed ‘Ministry of Marriage’ some years back, but it has never been any secret that family life is the backbone of the nation. Its economic value to capitalism in providing both the unpaid maintenance of the labour force, and a floating pool of ‘reserve labour’, i.e. women, has been well documented in Marxist and feminist writings. It also plays a direct ideological role in maintaining the status quo, through channelling the socialization of children into the accepted social structure, a role it shares with ‘education’. These functions of the family show that it is intimately connected with what Gramsci calls ‘political society’ or ‘The State’.1
But what is contradictory about the ideology of the family is that it appears as the area of life most distant from the State, most ‘private’ and entirely non-political. While this is by no means a new phenomenon, it is worth noting that a major Tory achievement in the years leading up to and after 1979 has been to imbue the family with an aura of independence and individualism in total opposition to the State, and particularly the Welfare State: so that while drawing heavily on the economic and social support of the family the government can manage to suggest that this burden is a gift of freedom, a seal of separateness from itself. The representation of the family as an autonomous emotional unit cuts across class and power relations to imply that we all share the same experience. It provides a common sexual and economic goal: images of family life hold out pleasure and leisure as the fulfilment of desires which, if not thus contained, could cause social chaos.
These images almost invariably take the form of photographs, and have done since the middle of the 19th century. However, photography is not just the means through which ideological representations are produced; like the family, it is an economic institution with its own structures and ideology. It is possible to distinguish three different production relationships in the area of photography and the family:
1. The photograph as commodity in the ‘public’ sphere:
A photographer produces a photograph which is a commodity bought by a magazine, newspaper or advertising agency. It is ‘consumed’ by us metaphorically, as viewers, but we do not actually buy the image on, for example, a billboard. Often the photographs which are the commodities of greatest value in this market are of families, e.g. the Royal family, Cecil Parkinson’s family, Sting visiting wife and new baby in hospital, etc. In this sphere families can look at representations not of themselves, but of other families they are encouraged to identify with themselves.
2. The photograph as commodity in the ‘private’ sphere:
A photographer produces (usually in a studio) a photograph which is a commodity bought by the person/people photographed, mainly families (or would-be families, like engaged couples). In this sphere individual families can buy representations of themselves.
3. The camera as commodity in the ‘private’ sphere:
When a photograph is taken by someone who is not a ‘photographer’ i.e. an amateur, usually in a family, the photograph itself is not a saleable commodity (unlesss it by chance shows something of public importance, or is a baby snap of a current pop-star etc). It is then the camera and processing which are the economic focus of the photographic industry; the value of photographs as commodities in the first two examples above, is preserved through the clear ideological instructions in camera/processing advertisements about how and what to photograph. In this sphere families can produce representations of themselves.
I shall deal with the first category last, since public images of the family rely almost entirely on the styles and implications of the second two. Royal wedding photos differ only in scale from ordinary commissioned wedding photos (category 2); advertising images of happy families playing frisbee or eating picnics differ only in contrivance and technique from the arrangements of family leisure found in private albums (category 3). There is also another, somewhat different area – Photography in ‘Education’: where on the one hand photos not sold as commodities take on the function of recording and monitoring, and on the other, photos of school groups, teams, or individual children become commodities sold to parents and other family relations. In this sphere photography occupies a position somewhere between the family album and criminal surveillance.
Perhaps the most influential family image in our culture has been that of the Madonna and child; father was absent long before he had to hold the camera. However, as the image of the family unit became secularized during the Renaissance, it became traditional for wealthy families to record and display their spiritual and material bonds through oil paintings of the entire family group; surrounded by land, possessions and, perhaps in a corner, a few discreet symbols of the mortality against which those possessions were shored. Only the upper classes could afford to commission such self-imagery; certainly poorer families were painted, but not at their own request. They featured as subjects for the more democratically minded artists who would, in this case, keep their pictures, not sell them to their poverty-stricken sitters. (This tradition lingers on in documentary photography, where the poor, the foreign and the injured are still regarded as having no stake in the images they provide.)
This gap between those who could and could not afford to own pictures of themselves was dramatically narrowed by the advent of photographic portraiture in the mid-19th century. Early daguerreotypes had, like paintings, been unique and more expensive objects, but by the 1860s the possibility of photographic printing on paper brought this form of representation within the reach of the middle classes. Because at this stage photography was still a cumbersome affair, photographs were taken in the photographer’s studio, which was furnished with a variety of props and backdrops, available equally to clients of all classes. It is sometimes quite difficult to tell the class of the stiffly posed Victorian couples leaning against classical pillars or standing in front of drapes, as they would be dressed in their best clothes and removed from their day-to-day surroundings.2
By the 1880s cameras were more mobile and could more easily enter the home space. Yet still the conventions of pose and setting were shared by working, middle and upper class alike. Queen Victoria was the first monarch to realize the marvellous ideological opportunities offered by photography and insisted on always being represented as a wife and mother, rather than a ruler. Photography played not merely an incidental but a central role in the development of the contemporary ideology of the family, in providing a form of representation which cut across classes, disguised social differences, and produced a sympathy of the exploited with their exploiters. It could make all families look more or less alike.
As the technology has become cheaper, the apparent democratization achieved in the image with Victorian photography, has now extended to the means of production of the image. Just as, in the last century, more people were able to own photographs, now more people are able to own cameras. Yet it is not entirely true to say that father (occasionally mother) has replaced the studio photographer. As cameras have become available on the mass market, the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ has been drawn more rigidly than ever before. Camera advertisements make quite clear that David Bailey or Don McCullin are allowed to take completely different kinds of pictures from us, even though the aspiring ‘amateur’ may use the same equipment (and make his wife look ten years younger). This demarcation is important, because with the slipping of the means of production into civilian hands, as it were, it becomes all the more important to control the kinds of images produced. This is achieved through convention, advertising, and even the images you find on the covers of the little folder your negatives are returned in from the labs. It is quite clear that the spoils of a holiday abroad are meant to be snaps of children on beaches, rather than shots of foreign political events.
Family photographs today divide into two different types: the formal, of weddings, christenings, graduation and so on, where professional photographers are still frequently used, and the informal, of holidays and other leisure time. The formal are a record, a kind of proof that the traditional landmarks of life have been reached, and these pictures have much in common with early ‘posed’ family photos. However, with the informal arrives a new element, never so highly developed as in contemporary family photography: the necessity of ‘FUN’.
In this modern ‘democratic’ idea, just as in the earlier levelling notion of the dignity of the family, photography plays a formative role.3 The ‘instant fun’ offered by the Polaroid camera ad is both the fun of the picture, that process that takes place ‘before your eyes’, and the fun in the picture, smiles and jolly moments frozen into one of those objects which create the systematic misrepresentation of childhood and family life. But it is as if the guarantee ‘before your eyes’ ensured the very reality of the emotion pictured. The more transparent the process, the more indisputably real the content. And the dominant content, in home family photography, seems always to be pleasure. In earlier family images it seemed enough for the family members to be presented to the camera, to be externally documented; but now this is not enough, and internal states of constant delight are to be revealed on film. Fun must not only be had, it must be seen to have been had.
This raises the more psychoanalytic question of what is repressed in family photographs. Because besides being used externally as a unit of social cement, the family is also an extremely oppressive thing to be in. Photography erases this experience not only from the outside, in adverts of happy, product-consuming families, it also erases it from within, as photos of angry parents, crying children or divorced spouses are selected for non-appearance in the family album. It is of great significance within a family which photos are kept and which discarded, and also who takes photos of whom; and it is a fact not often thought worth commenting on that children are always the ones ‘taken’ (though older children may own cameras). In the Kodak ad ‘Memories are made of this’ it is father’s hand that reaches for the camera in the foreground, to snap mother and the children who are unaware of his action. The ad stresses this with the barrier of the hedge, which makes father’s photographic activity seem surreptitious, sneaky, almost voyeuristic.
But the important point is, whose memories are being made of this? It is by and large parents’ memory that family photos represent, since parents took and selected the pictures. Yet children are offered a ‘memory’ of their own childhoods, made up of images constructed entirely by others. The hegemony of one class over another in representing public history, which offers us ‘memories’ of social life through TV and newsphotos, is paralleled in microcosm by this dominance of one version of family history, which represses much lived experience.
Yet as psychoanalysis has shown, nothing repressed ever disappears, and we may often be able to read in family photos ‘clues’ to their repressed elements. Walter Benjamin says that ‘photography makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis discloses the instinctual unconscious’.4 I would go further and say that the two are not only parallel; the ‘optical unconscious’ may on occasion reveal the ‘instinctual unconscious’. I discovered a personal example of this on examining old photographs that I found not in an album but loose in a drawer at my parents’ house. To this day I have no memory of jealousy at my sister’s birth when I was not yet two. Family mythology on the subject stated quite clearly that I had been a ‘good, grown-up girl’ and welcomed the new baby from the start; I must have cottoned on that this was expected as I can remember nothing else. Yet I was struck not only by the undeniably anxious and ambiguous looks that I gave the baby in all early pictures, but by the surprising fact that we were virtually the same size, and I had not been a grown-up girl at all.
Most ‘education’ goes hand in hand with families in repressing children and guiding them towards their niche in society; school and college photos reflect this with their family-like groupings. The school photo with the head in the centre, staff clustered around, juniors cross-legged on the ground, prefects at the back, looks like the portrait of an extended Victorian dynasty. (Of course, the traditional way to defy the convention of the slowly-panning school photograph was to run around the back and appear twice.) However, most schools today have replaced or supplemented the giant school photo with individual photos not unlike studio shots, which are offered for sale to the child’s parents. This shift reflects the trend from formal to more ‘personalized’ family photography. The one moment in educational careers still documented in traditional ritualistic form (like weddings), is graduation from college. Millions of students continue to hire gowns for this one day; their parents can have the photo which gives proof of their achievement.
All these kinds of photos merge with family photography. The one exception is the criminal type mug-shot usually taken on entry to the institution, so that staff can identify new students. But of course they are never really just ‘factual’: haircut, clothes, expression, the way they write their names, all build up assumptions about students before we even meet them let alone get to know them. And the photographs required in applications, although ostensibly for identification only, are often known to affect choice of interviewees.
All the ideologies incorporated into domestic photography – democracy, choice, fun, leisure – are reproduced on a large scale in public photographs which, in modelling themselves on the family photograph’s format, can more easily tap ‘family values’. Any sensible politician will use a family photo rather than a mug-shot on their election hand-out. We can be relied on to sympathize with the family of the industrialist kidnapped by ‘terrorists’, to share the excitement of royal weddings, and interest ourselves in the children of film stars. The forms of ‘private’ photography are especially important in the public sphere to guarantee the intimacy and identification between audience and subject which a formal press-photograph could not achieve. Advertising also relies heavily on images of the family, the crucial consumers of domestic goods, although rather than following domestic photography it holds out aspirations of how families should look, act, and consume. These kinds of pictures make up the great bulk of advertising. But even the most unlikely campaigns will make use of the ‘family album’ format to familiarize their product. My favourite is the ad for an American Express card which appears to have its own family/holiday album. This advertisement seems bizarre because nothing could be further removed in ideology than the family and giant banking corporations. Yet, returning to the discussion of the State, it is precisely this separation of the family from the political and economic interests it serves that gives it such ideological value; and photography, a process developed historically alongside the modern bourgeois family, has a large place in that value. Photography offers an important, enjoyable and potentially radical access to the means of producing self-images: but as long as those images remain bound by the ideology of the family, that potential will only occasionally or accidentally be realized.
(Ten-8, 1984)
NOTES
1. Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks describes ‘two major superstructural “levels”: the one that can be called “civil society”, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”, and that of “political society” or “the State”.’ His distinction between the ‘hegemony’ exercised by the dominant group in the former sphere, and the ‘direct domination’ exercised by ‘juridical’ government in the latter, paves the way for Althusser’s later differentiation between ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ and ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’. While the family would usually be categorized as an ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ in this schema, Gramsci’s description of two ‘levels’ makes it possible to see that the family does also come under the exercise of ‘juridical government’: it has a foot in both levels.
2. For some good examples of this, and a more detailed discussion of the history of family photographs, see Julia Hirsch, Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect.
3. As Walter Benjamin has pointed out (‘A Short History of Photography’), the ‘dignity’ and ‘repose’ that are part of the ideological aura of early photographs derive from the length of time necessary for successsful photographic exposure. People had to stand very still as the light ‘struggled painfully out of darkness’ onto the plate: thus technique and ideology were as inextricably linked as they are in today’s ‘instant fun’ Polaroid photography.
4. Walter Benjamin, op. cit.