Gillian Rose,Doing Family Photography: The Domestic,the Public and the Politics of Sentiment

Photographs taken at home are a rarely explored terrain for critics of photography. Snapshots that mothers produce, organize and send were precisely the research focus carried out by Professor Gillian Rose between 2000 and 2008 in the UK. More specifically, she focused not only on domestic photos but on the social practices in which they are intricate. Rose carried out a long-term project based on interviews with British mothers with young children, motivated by the fact that the work of printing, organizing, displaying and the sharing of family pictures is assumed mainly by women, as was her case (as well as the case of the writer of this review), probably because managing family pictures is related to the chores of home decoration and strengthening family ties.

The author asks herself why these images are so important for mothers. One of the main points developed in this work is the critical analysis of the elements that make up everyday life, which (as feminist critics have been pointing out for decades) are invisible to science and have been integrated as common and therefore of little interest. In her book, Rose shares her curiosity and invites us to look into the quotidian practices that we, or our mothers, sisters or neighbours, perform around family albums or photo albums shared online.

Rose’s research encourages us to reflect on the visibility of everyday elements and the generation of collective sentiments by the transference of maternal feelings. To do so, she gives us an impressive collection of references on the photographic act in modern times. However, in Doing Family Photography, the author does not allow us to see the snapshots that her informants relate to, nor does she write about the act of taking the picture. Instead, she methodologically focuses on conversations with mothers, elicited by observation and contact with photos of their children.

The focus group is situated in an intermediate point of interaction with various photographic technologies. Interestingly, most of the mothers who were interviewed have moved completely onto digital tools in only eight years of development of meetings with the researcher, but they are not exclusively digital users. When we talk about personal photos and how they happen, occasionally, to be public (which is the key theme of Rose’s research), we might easily think of users of Facebook, Fotolog or Instagram, or other online image sharing platforms, which have radically changed the exposure of personal images to the public. However, this book focuses on users that integrate analogue and digital technologies, physical and virtual albums, classic Christmas cards and images attached to emails.

The images that these mothers store, classify, share and, rarely, get rid of, serve as a channel of constitution of the family network, lived as a unit that is close and distant at the same time. Mothers viewing and sharing photos of their children negotiate their ambiguous relationship with them, while their mothering is performed with an underlying desire to be seen as good mothers. Certainly they regard the fact of exhibiting pictures of their children and sharing them with relatives and close friends as a mark of good mothering. The apparent frivolity of the familiar images (which are typically considered as unoriginal and technically inaccurate, therefore, generally dismissed by photography critics) has also been the subject of criticism by feminist authors, as conveying a hegemonic and untroubled vision of the family. Nevertheless, Rose brings them to the foreground emphasizing that, first, they are unique witnesses of domestic life and, furthermore, serve to know the selection of idealized reality that these women are interested in portraying. The re-enactment of family life is a conscious act by the performers and is also a way for mothers to control how the family is seen regarding their point of view. Which is proof that images tell us more about people’s desires than of the physical reality that they represent.

As family relations become increasingly complex and distant, the exchange of photos as evidence of the development of children highlights the relationships between the various members of the group, both the connections and the shortcomings or absences. At the same time, these exchanges are nested in a visual economy (Poole, 1997), generating an expected valuation of the object circulated and, sometimes, also something in return.

The author stresses the importance of familiarity in the constitution of the global at the same level as politics or economy. The second part of the book focuses specifically on this, the role of qualities associated mainly to the domestic sphere (emotion, family, intimacy), when put into play in geopolitical relations and political communication (analysing the cases of the USA and, especially, of the UK). Rose attempts to break the dynamics of absence of family photographs in the analysis on contemporary visuality, terror and geopolitics. She does this based on the term ‘political sentiment’, coined by Berlant (1998), referring to the fact that emotional rhetoric has an increasingly central role in political communication and, especially, in the establishment of a public subject, an audience, and after all, of a nation. The public is being formed in an increasingly clear way by collective experiences of feeling and domestic photos play a key role in these processes, when circulated in the mass media. The pictures are always viewed one way or another depending on their context and therein lays the heart of this research: what becomes of social practices around the family photos when they go public? What ethics and politics surround them?

According to Rose, family photos, having the virtue of allowing a house to become a home, can also help to create a public space (and therefore politicize it). To illustrate this phenomenon, she exemplifies the emergence of domestic images of victims and people involved in the bombings that took place in London in the summer of 2005. As we also saw in the example of New York in 2001, the photos of missing persons or those found dead flooded public spaces and, most specifically, the visual space of the mass media. At times, relatives of these victims, often mothers, were photographed holding the image of their loved ones. The emotional and moral rhetoric of mass dramatic events has been occupying increasingly the global visuality and this phenomenon has had particular effects on the audience. Family photos are easily recognizable, and this generates empathy from the public and creates a sense of common belonging and mourning.

The obsessive transmission of family snapshots around dramatic events generates a saturation of emotional information, and detaches these kinds of situations from political status, as Rose points out. The public is not invited to act, but to be passive and to feel compassion and grief, that is, a certain ‘traditionally feminine attitude’ towards disaster is collectively inoculated. The author observes that sentimental transmission by analysing the photos appeared in the British press after the bombings in London 2005 in terms of gender and race. Finally, a reminder: by inscribing these objects in a new context, we are leaving behind the family and domestic relationship that their main holders, mothers, previously had with them. A relationship that is not univocal but ambivalent, as Rose reasons, and that should be borne in mind when thinking of the ethical use of family snapshots to address an audience.

This book gives an excellent insight into how to understand the intertwining fields of the domestic and the public, based on analysing the visual economy and the visual practices in which family snapshots are embedded. It also provides a great example of how family life and kinship have an important influence in the bigger picture of the global world.