Kin: contemporary photographers look to their immediate family

Nineteen artists, 61 works, 1973-2009

Image:  Peter Peryer: My Parents. 1979

Laurence Aberhart, Janet Bayly, Alan Bekhuis, Peter Black, Rhondda Bosworth, Fiona Clark, Richard Collins, Margaret Dawson, Bruce Foster,

Joseph Griffen, Paul Johns, Nikolai Kokx, Anne Noble (Laureate), Fiona Pardington, Peter Peryer (Laureate), Clive Stone, Olivia Taylor, John B. Turner & Ans Westra (Icon).

The connections between the family and photography have been evident since the invention of the medium.

A photograph has that sense of presence, that trace of the real, and photographs sometimes make appear what we never see in a real face, a genetic feature.

We all make portraits photographs of family members and this exhibition looks at work made by currently active ‘creative photographers' who look to their first- & second- degree relatives. However, rather than being the mirrors of the soul  of the subjects, these portraits may reflect more the personality of the photographer.

‘The connections between the family and photography have been evident since the invention of the medium' [1],  

Also ‘...the photograph sometimes makes appear what we never see in a real face...a genetic feature, the fragment of oneself or of a relative which comes from some ancestor... the truth of lineage.' [3]

We all make portraits photographs of family members, but what distinguishes those made by ‘creative photographers', destined for a wider audience? ‘By photographing his family, the artist turns his back on remote, public subjects in order to investigate kinship...[1]  But how do family relationships and dynamics impact on the subject's gaze?  What is the level of intimacy, or psychological distance, between photographer and subject?

The photographs exhibited cover only one aspect of portraiture; that by currently active photographers who looking to their first - & second-degree relatives, pay particular attention to the personal and the private, during the period 1973 - 2009.

Geoffrey Batchen points out that ‘... the dilemma at the heart of all photographic portraiture, is a tension between the easy mechanical resemblance that a photograph provides and something-more-than-resemblance that the word portrait seems to promise. [6]

But a photograph has...that sense of presence, that trace of the real.... Roland Barthes says...: 'From a

real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, ... A sort of umbilical cord links

 the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin

 I share with anyone who has been photographed.' [6]

‘...future generations will judge our way of life, our culture and our inner world on the basis of photographs.'[7]

However, ‘if the conviction that photography "robbed" the soul reigned in the 19^th C, in the 20^th C photography would become the soul's mirror.' Things then shifted ‘to what Barthes has described as the battle of two identities with distinct domains: on the one hand, there is the photographer-voyeur, and on the other the photographed subject which elaborates its social masquerade to back up its image. In this new age, rather than being the "mirrors of the soul" of the sitters, portraits reflected the personality of the photographer' [8]

[1] Henri Peretz in Family: Photographers photograph their families, Phaidon, 2005

[3] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980, page103

[6] Geoffrey Batchen Mirror with a Memory: Photographic portraiture in Australia, National Portrait Gallery, 2000

[8] Kowasa Gallery exhibition notes, The Vision of the Other: Modernity and the Photographed Face, 2009

(Sourced, McNamara Gallery press release)