Abstract
In Visual Methodologies (Rose, 2001), I was introduced to a number of useful ideas, techniques and concepts, including auteur theory, which helped me design and develop my own doctoral research (Mannay, 2010). For this reason, when I was invited to review Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment, I was eager to read the book and gain some new insights into the visual. I was not disappointed.
Rose presents family photographs both in their domestic settings and in the public realm, not simply as a collection of images but rather as a social practice. Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, geography and material culture studies, Rose takes the reader on a journey that reveals not what photographs are but what photographs do.
The introduction contextualises the rationale of the book and offers a succinct overview of each of the chapters. This is followed by ‘How to look at family photographs: practices, objects, subjects and places’. This second chapter begins by discussing the ways in which family photographs have become an unpopular site of exploration, characterised as stereotyped, ubiquitous and having an overwhelming sense of similarity and redundancy.
Rose takes issue with such melancholy and argues that if what is ordinarily done with photographs was given more attention, then their sentimentality and repetition may become interesting again. For Rose, family photographs are embedded in specific practices, and it is the specificity of those practices, not simply their content, that defines an image as a family photograph. In this way, their meaning is only part of their story, and Rose introduces her own research here, sharing how she interviewed women in their own homes to gain a sense of the domestic space and the encounters between object and practice in family photography, namely, subject positions and social relations.
The third chapter ‘What is done with family snaps?’ focuses on this research project, which explores family photography with a group of middle-class women living in south-east England. Rose presents her participants’ photographs as indexical for they are dated, stored, displayed, looked at and circulated. Family photographs are rarely thrown away, and Rose argues that this is because they are a material trace of the person photographed. For all the women in the study, photographs were not only about picturing happy moments but also about the ongoing process of revisiting and sharing the images, which would again generate pleasure and also enact familial integration.
The chapter ‘What happens with this doing? Family, domestic space and mothering’ focuses on the enactment of family togetherness and the ways in which the integration of family photographs is both temporal and spatial. For Rose, photographs extend togetherness in time and space, but this requires work. The labour of family photographs, Rose argues, can be seen as women’s traditional responsibility for domestic order, but it is also a way for women to negotiate a feminised subjectivity of acceptable motherhood.
In ‘The circulation of family photos in the visual economy’, Rose maintains that family photographs are part of the visual economy. Photographs are presented as gifts for exchange, a commodity, but photographs also establish relationships between people and are not simply commodities. In the domestic sphere then, the global circulation of family photographs is complex, differentiated and cannot be seen as fully commodified.
‘Family photos going public’ focuses on the emergence of family photographs from their domestic spaces into the public sphere, where significantly different practices are at work, and the media employ the affective power of these images to address the public. ‘The politics of sentiment: picturing the missing and the dead in London, July 2005’ examines the reporting of the bombs that exploded on the public transport system in 2005 by the British press, paying particular attention to how the readers of the newspapers were positioned and what they were invited to feel.
Rose considers how colonial, imaginary and gendered discourses and the exclusionary exceptions of who is normatively human were presented in the form of photographs and their accompanying text, to engender a particular kind of intimate public. ‘Looking again, ethically, at family snaps in the mass media’ reflects on this public as resonant of a pain alliance where a passive ideal of empathy is constructed from caring based on similarity. For Rose, this is a crude empathy, which comes ‘dangerously close to the appropriation of someone else’s experience because we feel for another only insofar as we are positioned as being like that other’ (p. 113). In response, Rose calls for ethics in the field of vision where we learn to look again, differently.
‘Conclusions: Family photographs, domestic and public, and the contemporary visual economy’ revisits the three questions Rose set out to answer: ‘What do family photographs do?’, ‘What happens when family photographs move from their domestic locations and enter public space?’ and ‘How to look ethically at pictures of the victims of violence?’. Rose demonstrates a breadth and depth of understanding, presents thoughtful answers and also raises new ethical questions and challenges. I would highly recommend this book to an interdisciplinary audience. Doing Family Photography is innovative, questioning and poignant.