From Gallery Walls to Instagram
The Evolution of Family Photographs
From the series These Moments Matter 2010
We all come in one at a time, nervous, clutching at folders and laptops — this is our first critique.
It's the Autumn of 2011 and a collection of students, myself among them, sit in a tutorial room in the London College of Communication. We are about to embark on a part-time MA in Photography.
I'm asking myself, why am I here? as anxiety fills my body.
A few months ago, I had decided I wanted to get back to exhibiting photography. My youngest daughter had started primary school and the question of What Will You Do All Day was raising its ugly head in the many conversations I was having in the playground at pick-up.
A kind photographer friend advised me that applying for post-graduate education would be great for me, my work, my career. I would be exposed to practitioners from the fine art world who would generously share their knowledge and I would meet a group of like-minded students, those who were also trying to launch themselves into this brave new world.
I thought this was all a great idea.
The Trouble With My Photographs
Once our tutor arrived, the crit began. One at a time, a fellow student presented a photographic project they'd been working on. When it was my turn I nervously showed a series of photographs I'd exhibited the year before entitled These Moments Matter — an edited collection of colour photographs expressing the small fleeting moments of childhood. I was interested in curating a different kind of family album, one that spoke about the challenges of parenting — the physicality, the emotional effort and the tension involved.
One woman found my photographs troubling.
Articulate and knowledgeable about the historical significance of family photography, she questioned what my photographs represented. She saw an uncomfortable power dynamic; a depiction of children and childhood from an adult point of view. This wasn't helped by the camera lens levelled from above my children rather than down at their level.
It was at that moment that I came to understand something. A photograph does two things:
There's the image that the photographer takes; the way they frame the subject matter, the choice of black & white or colour, to move in close or whether to stay back.
Then there is what an audience brings to that photograph when they look at it. They bring everything of themselves — age, gender, culture, race, upbringing etc. According to their life experience that photograph will have impact in a variety of ways.
Grappling with the Ethics of Photographing My Kids
The year before I had exhibited my photographs at Brighton Fringe Photography Festival, the city we used to live in. One quiet day when I was invigilating, two teenage girls came in to look around. After a while, I became aware they were becoming increasingly agitated and the agitation was directed at my photographs.
They were appalled. Appalled that someone would take pictures of their children and exhibit them as art. They asked me who the photographer was. Shamefully I lied and said I didn't know them. I felt completely unable to defend my choices in the face of their anger.
A few days later I discovered they were teen mums. At the time I was 41. We couldn't have been further apart in our life experiences.
Testing my photographs in the safe environment of the crit, the work was criticised again. This time I had to listen.
Shifting Direction to Self-Portraiture and Video
For the next several months, I went from crit to crit, tutorial to tutorial, trying to work out if the direction I was going in was even ethical. The biggest question that jabbed at my brain: Was I exploiting my kids? I wrangled with for a long time.
My choice felt clear. Change direction or leave the course altogether. I changed direction. I started using myself as the subject matter and went from still photography to expressing a new project in video and sound.
Fortunately, this shift in thinking helped me move forward in a way that felt less conflicting. It felt better, less personal, and more objective.
The Evolving Norms of Sharing Children's Images
It might seem naïve to say, but when I exhibited my photographs all those years ago I never thought about 'my audience'. Remember. This was over a decade ago. I'm not even sure there was such a thing as an influencer or a content creator just people that had gone viral and gained huge amounts of followers. There certainly wasn't TikTok.
By 2011 (according to perpelexity.ai) Facebook accounted for 75% of time spent on social media sites globally. By September 2011, Twitter reached 100 million active users per day and by the end of that same year, Instagram had 15 million active users.
It seems a lot right? But let's look at some similar data for 2024.
Instagram has over 1 billion active users, Facebook has over 3 billion active users and X (formerly Twitter) has 611 million active users.
So when we think about the world back in 2011, our level of social media use was relatively small. I mention this because as I sat there feeling pretty awful that I'd even raised a camera to photograph my children let alone shared framed prints of those pictures on a gallery wall, I had to think about that criticism, my audience, and what that meant for my work.
Controversial Imagery
If you know your photographers you will probably know Sally Mann, a fine art photographer from the American South who gained huge recognition in the 1990s for Immediate Family - a series of photographs of her three young children living what looks to be an idyllic, wildly feral life in rural Virginia.
There's no doubting Mann's technical and artistic skill. The photographs are quite beautiful. Mann uses vintage large format cameras producing extraordinary negatives, the resulting prints seductive and haunting.
Then the controversy began as religious leaders, politicians and experts from the art world weighed in to criticise the work, focusing on a few images where her children are pictured naked. You can read more about her experience in Unpicking the controversy behind Sally Mann’s iconic photos of her children.
There are other photographers too, family photographer Niki Boon, for example, navigating this dynamic of power between the adult and the child; between what the adult sees versus what the child experiences.
Understanding the Power of Photographs
In this day and age, I feel it wise to be prudent about what imagery of ourselves and our families we put out into the world — we need to understand how our pictures might be viewed.
In the olden days, photographs rarely left the album on the shelf or the packets shoved in a drawer. Now we can snap away, 100s if not 1000s of photographs in one day and share them with the world across all social media platforms.
For some, this may seem unproblematic but I think it raises some pertinent questions about ownership and identity. Does a parent 'own' their child? Is it right to share photographs of the very young, those who are too young to control the way their image is presented to the world?
For me, ever since 2011, I have been cautious about sharing pictures of my children online, or anywhere in fact. My daughters are now 19 and 17 and have their own social media accounts. They are in control of what they post online. I always ask if I can post a picture of them. They do too. It's a two-way street. I ask them, and they ask me.
It may seem overly protective.
What's the harm?
But this is to misunderstand the power of a photograph. It's why we take them in the first place, isn't it?
