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About the PhotographerThomas Allen Harris is a filmmaker and artist whose work across film, video, photography, and performance illuminates the human condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. In 2009, Harris founded Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, LLC (DDFR) a social engaged transmedia project that has incorporated community organizing, performance, virtual gathering spaces, and storytelling into unique audio-visual events. In 2019, Harris brought DDFR to national TV with Family Pictures USA. |
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Truth in Photography: Talk a little bit about what led you to start Family Pictures.
Thomas Allen Harris: Family Pictures USA is a project that has been evolving since I started making films, if not before, because I was very involved in the family photographs that adorned my grandparents’ house. They were a way of understanding family stories, and my grandfather was a great storyteller and the family photographer. And so they really occupied my imaginary space. They opened the window to a world that no longer existed and seemed far away in terms of time, and also another dimension that included people that no longer were living, and histories, and there was the question of why these images were there. Was it to keep this person alive, their story alive? They had this kind of almost tangible link to a parallel place and time... a presence. And so a lot of my film and media work is connected to illuminating the human condition and the search for identity, family and spirituality. |
Thomas Allen Harris promotional image. Courtesy Thomas Allen Harris
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After I'd been working in television as a Public Affairs producer, I got my very first video camera in 1990-91, and the first thing I did was interview my grandfather about his story. And this process of interviewing family and community members continued with my independent films and art projects. My work employs community storytelling methodologies that I've been pioneering since the 90s. Family Pictures USA is a culmination of that interest and that research. But it's also very much tied to a kind of recouping of lost or repressed narratives.
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The first time I engaged family photographs in a way that is similar to Family Pictures USA was the film I made in South Africa, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela: A Son’s Tribute to Unsung Heroes, which was broadcast on PBS and around the world. For that project, I took my late stepfather Benjamin Pule Leinaeng’s archive, his photographic album, back to South Africa, and shared it with various groups of people including his comrades with whom he had left South Africa in exile in 1961. Very few of this first wave of South African exiles were able to maintain photographic records and archives, because they were all revolutionaries living very transient lives. They were freedom fighters in the very early days of the antiapartheid movement. They had left when they were in their late teens, early 20s. Some had not even seen these photographs, and it took them back to a place where they recalled the moment of posing for an image, the ritual of that photographic production. They were like, “Oh, my God, can I even recognize myself? Who was I back then 40 years ago, before all the countries I lived in?”
For the young actors who did not know the story of these exiles - some of whom were now their neighbors - my dad’s photographic album really helped them to understand and represent on camera this missing history that had been whitewashed by the apartheid regime. This project actually resulted in raising a national awareness and celebration of this generation of forgotten anti-apartheid exiles. The image from Lee’s archive of the group during their first leg of exile in Dar-es Salaam, Tanzania, is now circulated widely across the country. It has brought awareness about this important history and has come to symbolize the South African freedom fighters in exile who sacrificed so much to bring about a democratic South Africa. I saw the power of using images to elevate a story that had been suppressed - to use images in a transformative community storytelling process that resulted in broadening a public narrative around where we come from and who we are. |
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When I started developing my next film, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, inspired by Deborah Willis’s ground breaking publication Reflections in Black: Black Photographers from 1840 to the Present, I wanted to create an outreach project that would run parallel to the film that would also activate community archives. As a result of my experience with Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, I wanted to see what happens when we begin to understand or surface images that had been suppressed, and the range of representations that are available to us with regards to how we see ourselves and one another as family members versus as racialized beings in America.
And so I created a prototype that was going to be an online project, Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR), with producer Ann Bennett. We created this prototype for an online project back in 2008 but when we started to shop it around, people began asking us to present it as a live interactive show. All of a sudden I found myself in the roadshow business. The Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow elevated what I did in a very personal way in South Africa, but now in a more public forum, connecting the keepers of family photographs with the stories behind these images. This interactive public performance of sharing private images provided participants a new way to think about and contextualize their family photographs. The transformative act of photo sharing was recorded in interviews and still images. |
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Trailer for Through a Lens Darkly
The Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow ran for almost the entire production of Through a Lens Darkly. It continued even after the film was done and distributed, and we just kept getting the invitations. We never really marketed it, people found us. And so communities actually called us to organize these gatherings. I have a background in performance art - as a performer as well as teaching performance art at UCSD, and I have to acknowledge my colleague and mentor Alan Kaprow who coined the term “happenings” to describe performances and events that blur the lines between life, art, artist and audience. I see DDFR Roadshow in dialogue with Kaprow’s project in that each DDFR event is a unique experience that cannot be replicated - it is interactive and tears down the fourth wall between artist and audience.
We didn’t launch the DDFR Roadshow with the goal of building an archive. It was more about being called to connect people with things that they hold dear, and doing that through photography. I have to say that for me the project and the ritual of taking photographs has this spiritual connection; maybe it has to do with ancestors and also the notion of communion and immortality. This photograph is gonna survive all of us, right?
As we continued to tour with DDFR, I thought we could scale this project up. To do it in a way that would help a large audience, but also would allow us to maintain a local place-based focus. For example, to what degree we can tell the story of a region through the family albums. To what degree do family photographs contain within them the narrative of a collective story about say a city like Detroit or an area like the Piedmont in North Carolina or about southwest Florida? And how does the family photograph transform narratives at a local level as well as at a national level - changing the way we as Americans see and understand each other and the places we hail from?
We didn’t launch the DDFR Roadshow with the goal of building an archive. It was more about being called to connect people with things that they hold dear, and doing that through photography. I have to say that for me the project and the ritual of taking photographs has this spiritual connection; maybe it has to do with ancestors and also the notion of communion and immortality. This photograph is gonna survive all of us, right?
As we continued to tour with DDFR, I thought we could scale this project up. To do it in a way that would help a large audience, but also would allow us to maintain a local place-based focus. For example, to what degree we can tell the story of a region through the family albums. To what degree do family photographs contain within them the narrative of a collective story about say a city like Detroit or an area like the Piedmont in North Carolina or about southwest Florida? And how does the family photograph transform narratives at a local level as well as at a national level - changing the way we as Americans see and understand each other and the places we hail from?
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Family Pictures USA, 2018. Durham, North Carolina. Courtesy Thomas Allen Harris
TiP: To what extent do you think that family pictures show the truth of family or community?
Harris: We all know the adage: a picture’s worth a thousand words -- you could show the same photograph to 12 different people, and they would see 12 different narratives in it. They could be contradictory narratives, but they would be that person's truth. I think that any particular image can be a repository for a lot of different truths. There's authenticity around the truth of the image, that the image was made, and the circumstances around the making of that image, that's irrefutable. But I do think that, in terms of truth and photography, vis a vis Family Pictures USA, there is a certain power around creating a narrative out of multiple truths - multiple images and multiple stories within the family… or community… or the nation. The idea of weaving disparate narratives, particularly across generations, ethnicity, and other differences, presents a truth that is valuable to us in terms of our survival as a collective and diverse body. To witness and acknowledge the truths in one another’s experiences. This is so important especially in this present moment, after coming out of the last four years where truth has been so politicized.
TiP: It seems that family photographs, by the nature of which they're framed and made, are very much about self representation. They're about the idealized family. They tend to not be candid. It seems so often that the most highly valued images are those that are frontal, where the subject is very much aware of the camera and the way in which they're presenting themselves. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Harris: That is such a big and complicated question. I will try to answer it concisely. Yes, there is great power in self representation - especially for subjects from marginalized communities - the act of representing themselves as beautiful, as strong, as self-determined in a way that they can derive a sense of pride. I have seen a lot of family photographs. And I have to say that depending on the time period, they come in a lot of different kinds of guises and different categories, from formal portraits to blurry snapshots. Laura Wexler talks about the family album in “The State of the Album” as a kind of embodiment of the state and conforming to certain narratives with regards to nuclear family representation. One could be very critical of the family album as a kind of a tool to conform, a tool that's ideologically invested in how the state defines family. My work for the last 30 years has been foregrounding another kind of album, a liberatory album, one that has centered queer communities and people of color who have been absented from traditional or conventional family album narratives. These might include families of choice, matriarchal families, multi-racial and diasporic families, queer families, families of migrants, differently abled families and families from different class and economic backgrounds. I would agree that the frontal image is most valued but sometimes, even a blurry off-centered image of someone might hold just as much meaning - especially if it's the only image of that person that exists.
Harris: We all know the adage: a picture’s worth a thousand words -- you could show the same photograph to 12 different people, and they would see 12 different narratives in it. They could be contradictory narratives, but they would be that person's truth. I think that any particular image can be a repository for a lot of different truths. There's authenticity around the truth of the image, that the image was made, and the circumstances around the making of that image, that's irrefutable. But I do think that, in terms of truth and photography, vis a vis Family Pictures USA, there is a certain power around creating a narrative out of multiple truths - multiple images and multiple stories within the family… or community… or the nation. The idea of weaving disparate narratives, particularly across generations, ethnicity, and other differences, presents a truth that is valuable to us in terms of our survival as a collective and diverse body. To witness and acknowledge the truths in one another’s experiences. This is so important especially in this present moment, after coming out of the last four years where truth has been so politicized.
TiP: It seems that family photographs, by the nature of which they're framed and made, are very much about self representation. They're about the idealized family. They tend to not be candid. It seems so often that the most highly valued images are those that are frontal, where the subject is very much aware of the camera and the way in which they're presenting themselves. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Harris: That is such a big and complicated question. I will try to answer it concisely. Yes, there is great power in self representation - especially for subjects from marginalized communities - the act of representing themselves as beautiful, as strong, as self-determined in a way that they can derive a sense of pride. I have seen a lot of family photographs. And I have to say that depending on the time period, they come in a lot of different kinds of guises and different categories, from formal portraits to blurry snapshots. Laura Wexler talks about the family album in “The State of the Album” as a kind of embodiment of the state and conforming to certain narratives with regards to nuclear family representation. One could be very critical of the family album as a kind of a tool to conform, a tool that's ideologically invested in how the state defines family. My work for the last 30 years has been foregrounding another kind of album, a liberatory album, one that has centered queer communities and people of color who have been absented from traditional or conventional family album narratives. These might include families of choice, matriarchal families, multi-racial and diasporic families, queer families, families of migrants, differently abled families and families from different class and economic backgrounds. I would agree that the frontal image is most valued but sometimes, even a blurry off-centered image of someone might hold just as much meaning - especially if it's the only image of that person that exists.
Family Pictures USA, 2018. Immokalee, Southwest Florida. Courtesy Thomas Allen Harris
TiP: It seems that the approach to making family pictures is somewhat universal. And the context is different. The dress is different, the physicality of the people in the pictures. But there's something about this genre of family pictures that is remarkably kind of consistent from culture to culture. If you look at people who have different nationalities, different cultures, different social economic stature, the pictures don't necessarily tell you that. You can see the trappings of family are different, or the way people look, or maybe the way they sit. But generally, it's almost a universal quality. Could you talk about some of the linking threads that you've noticed? Is there a commonality among all cultures, or is each culture different?
Harris: I do think that the performative and/or ritual aspect of family pictures is pretty universal. But a pretty significant part of the Family Pictures USA methodology has to do with creating a safe space for the person who was connected to the image to talk about that photograph, talk about what was happening 10 minutes before, 10 minutes after, and to give a kind of framing of the performance of “I am happy at this wedding,” for instance. Then you hear the stories about the chaos at that wedding and all the competing interests and motivations, that might have to do with fear, ambivalence or desire, and these stories that might support the dominant perceived narrative in the image, or that might contradict it, are really telling, and they're really surprising. And then there is also the truth of the emotion that's attached to that image, that might be direct, or might have been passed down across the generation that talks about a moment of loss, a moment of trauma, a moment of joy, a moment before and after. Before getting onto that boat and saying goodbye to a place you would never see again, or the arrival from Mississippi to Chicago or Ellis Island. Whether you're talking about selfies today, or you're talking about images that were taken 10 years ago, 50 years ago, the performative aspect, and what motivates that, whether it's to elicit comments or likes or to send a message to someone that “Here I am, and I've made it,” or that says, “All this hard work I've done and the sacrifices I've made for my family are worth it,” because here we are conforming to a model of success.
TiP: It seems that another aspect of family pictures is that the subject matter or the people are more important than the maker of the image. In most cases, the identity of who made the photograph is secondary, or tertiary, to what the content is.
Harris: I would definitely agree. Now, the places where that does shift is what lies at the heart of Deborah Willis’s Reflections In Black and our film Through a Lens Darkly. That film foregrounds the maker, people like Florestine Perrault Collins or Austin Hanson or Lyle Ashton Harris. To have a James Van Der Zee image – my family has several -- or to have an image by any number of other photographers who were connected to the Harlem Renaissance or other renaissances that were happening across the country at the time, who are documenting this social and cultural emergence, is quite significant. They were people who were taking commissions, and a lot of their commissions happened to be family photographs. In fact, at a time when many of the works by Black photographers were not being collected, maintained or archived by cultural institutions, they were being cared for and passed down and preserved by the photographer’s family as well as descendants of the subject in the photo.
TiP: Another dimension to family pictures is the fact that they're frequently made to be shared.
Harris: Absolutely, they are made to be shared. Historically as well as in the present moment, the digital moment, they were also meant to be shared and exhibited. It is a vernacular form of storytelling. Whether within curated family albums, or on walls, on TV sets, or above mantels, on computers, etc. I mean, it's interesting, when you think about that in the context of the images of Van Der Zee that were adorning my grandfather's walls. Those images, in other places, are considered works of art that are on the walls of museums. In the house it was the same, but it was also about the connection of the person. At one point there was a shift of looking at my grandparents wedding photograph from the perspective of, “this is a photograph of this couple out of whom this family rose,” to, “this is an image taken in the studio,” which then ties them historically to the Harlem Renaissance. Then you actually have to hold both of those things together, because there is a certain social and artistic narrative around them.
Harris: I do think that the performative and/or ritual aspect of family pictures is pretty universal. But a pretty significant part of the Family Pictures USA methodology has to do with creating a safe space for the person who was connected to the image to talk about that photograph, talk about what was happening 10 minutes before, 10 minutes after, and to give a kind of framing of the performance of “I am happy at this wedding,” for instance. Then you hear the stories about the chaos at that wedding and all the competing interests and motivations, that might have to do with fear, ambivalence or desire, and these stories that might support the dominant perceived narrative in the image, or that might contradict it, are really telling, and they're really surprising. And then there is also the truth of the emotion that's attached to that image, that might be direct, or might have been passed down across the generation that talks about a moment of loss, a moment of trauma, a moment of joy, a moment before and after. Before getting onto that boat and saying goodbye to a place you would never see again, or the arrival from Mississippi to Chicago or Ellis Island. Whether you're talking about selfies today, or you're talking about images that were taken 10 years ago, 50 years ago, the performative aspect, and what motivates that, whether it's to elicit comments or likes or to send a message to someone that “Here I am, and I've made it,” or that says, “All this hard work I've done and the sacrifices I've made for my family are worth it,” because here we are conforming to a model of success.
TiP: It seems that another aspect of family pictures is that the subject matter or the people are more important than the maker of the image. In most cases, the identity of who made the photograph is secondary, or tertiary, to what the content is.
Harris: I would definitely agree. Now, the places where that does shift is what lies at the heart of Deborah Willis’s Reflections In Black and our film Through a Lens Darkly. That film foregrounds the maker, people like Florestine Perrault Collins or Austin Hanson or Lyle Ashton Harris. To have a James Van Der Zee image – my family has several -- or to have an image by any number of other photographers who were connected to the Harlem Renaissance or other renaissances that were happening across the country at the time, who are documenting this social and cultural emergence, is quite significant. They were people who were taking commissions, and a lot of their commissions happened to be family photographs. In fact, at a time when many of the works by Black photographers were not being collected, maintained or archived by cultural institutions, they were being cared for and passed down and preserved by the photographer’s family as well as descendants of the subject in the photo.
TiP: Another dimension to family pictures is the fact that they're frequently made to be shared.
Harris: Absolutely, they are made to be shared. Historically as well as in the present moment, the digital moment, they were also meant to be shared and exhibited. It is a vernacular form of storytelling. Whether within curated family albums, or on walls, on TV sets, or above mantels, on computers, etc. I mean, it's interesting, when you think about that in the context of the images of Van Der Zee that were adorning my grandfather's walls. Those images, in other places, are considered works of art that are on the walls of museums. In the house it was the same, but it was also about the connection of the person. At one point there was a shift of looking at my grandparents wedding photograph from the perspective of, “this is a photograph of this couple out of whom this family rose,” to, “this is an image taken in the studio,” which then ties them historically to the Harlem Renaissance. Then you actually have to hold both of those things together, because there is a certain social and artistic narrative around them.
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Family Pictures USA, 2018. Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Courtesy Thomas Allen Harris
TiP: What are some of the most striking family photographs you've seen? What are the images that stand out for you?
Harris: I've interviewed over four thousand people about their family photographs so I feel like I have a really intimate relationship with lots of images - I find something pretty amazing and special about every single one. I feel like there's something to be found in every image I've laid my eyes on. Some of the images that stood out to me are images that depict LGBT people in the south in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and also all across the country, in particular Black LGBT communities, and how they were such a fundamental and dominant part of the entertainment space. I was in California, in the Bay Area, and I had just shown Through a Lens Darkly, and this big football player comes up to me and says, “You know, I want to talk to you,” and he starts scrolling, showing me pictures of his great-great grandmother, and then he shows me pictures of her son, one of his great uncles, and he shows me the great uncle in drag - in a floor length gown, a tiara, etc. And it's in the 20s, in North Carolina, at a time when there were laws on the books against wearing more than one item of clothes of the opposite gender. It was really amazing that these images exist and that this straight football player not only had them in his family album, but had also transformed his album to his phone and kept those images as part of it. Queer people are so often alienated and feel like they are the first ones in their families, and so to actually be able to see narratives of these communities, I think that is pretty amazing. Especially people who have kept these visual narratives within the album, as opposed to excising them, because, you know, narrative family albums are constantly being edited. This is something I talk about in Through a Lens Darkly, which I think opened up space for him to show me these images.
I think that the other amazing material I've seen are documentation of multiracial communities that took place across the country prior to Birth of a Nation, which saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which went about desegregating a lot of the towns in the West and the North. In addition, there were a lot of different photos of thriving African American and multiracial communities that I saw that were taken in Oklahoma, before Tulsa, particularly following Reconstruction and before 1920, that created these vibrant and rich cities. When I was in college, people were asking, “Why haven't African Americans been able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps? Like the Italians or the Jews or the Germans, why have we not been able to do that?” And you see that actually this was done in communities, even with an onslaught that often was economic in the context of systemic racism, but also became physically violent, and culminated in wars against these communities.
Then there are images of women who went West who crossdressed, not because of their sexual orientation, but because that's what they did to go West. That's how they protected themselves. Amazing images. Images of Native Americans at different moments of contact with European American photographers, whether on Native lands or trading posts, are very interesting for me. I love images that depict these crossroad moments where people of differences come together and you see a certain equivalency, relationships and exchange. So, all these suppressed stories of the American story are images that are like, “Whoa!”
Harris: I've interviewed over four thousand people about their family photographs so I feel like I have a really intimate relationship with lots of images - I find something pretty amazing and special about every single one. I feel like there's something to be found in every image I've laid my eyes on. Some of the images that stood out to me are images that depict LGBT people in the south in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and also all across the country, in particular Black LGBT communities, and how they were such a fundamental and dominant part of the entertainment space. I was in California, in the Bay Area, and I had just shown Through a Lens Darkly, and this big football player comes up to me and says, “You know, I want to talk to you,” and he starts scrolling, showing me pictures of his great-great grandmother, and then he shows me pictures of her son, one of his great uncles, and he shows me the great uncle in drag - in a floor length gown, a tiara, etc. And it's in the 20s, in North Carolina, at a time when there were laws on the books against wearing more than one item of clothes of the opposite gender. It was really amazing that these images exist and that this straight football player not only had them in his family album, but had also transformed his album to his phone and kept those images as part of it. Queer people are so often alienated and feel like they are the first ones in their families, and so to actually be able to see narratives of these communities, I think that is pretty amazing. Especially people who have kept these visual narratives within the album, as opposed to excising them, because, you know, narrative family albums are constantly being edited. This is something I talk about in Through a Lens Darkly, which I think opened up space for him to show me these images.
I think that the other amazing material I've seen are documentation of multiracial communities that took place across the country prior to Birth of a Nation, which saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which went about desegregating a lot of the towns in the West and the North. In addition, there were a lot of different photos of thriving African American and multiracial communities that I saw that were taken in Oklahoma, before Tulsa, particularly following Reconstruction and before 1920, that created these vibrant and rich cities. When I was in college, people were asking, “Why haven't African Americans been able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps? Like the Italians or the Jews or the Germans, why have we not been able to do that?” And you see that actually this was done in communities, even with an onslaught that often was economic in the context of systemic racism, but also became physically violent, and culminated in wars against these communities.
Then there are images of women who went West who crossdressed, not because of their sexual orientation, but because that's what they did to go West. That's how they protected themselves. Amazing images. Images of Native Americans at different moments of contact with European American photographers, whether on Native lands or trading posts, are very interesting for me. I love images that depict these crossroad moments where people of differences come together and you see a certain equivalency, relationships and exchange. So, all these suppressed stories of the American story are images that are like, “Whoa!”
Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, Saratoga Springs, New York, 2015. Courtesy Thomas Allen Harris
TiP: There is something about family pictures that sometimes reveal a truth about America that we didn't know was there.
Harris: I have interviewed people who have a lot of those really early images and have family stories that are attached to them. For other images, orphan images, there might not be as much information. I might encounter them in an archive. I have the enormous privilege to be on faculty at Yale University, which has the Beinecke Library and photographic archive, and there are certain areas of specialities that they have. So, over the course of just my very short time there, I've been able to experience and research different types of images, and I'm looking forward to doing even more. I teach courses in which I provide a platform for my students to examine their own family photographic archives and remix them, in terms of the way in which they're framing them, the way they see them, but also contextualize them with public archives. A significant number of students that take my classes are first or second generation Americans, or some of them are biracial, and it’s wonderful to see how they use this kind of remixing, or this rereading of images, using the family album in creative ways to begin to work out some of these questions that they wanted to give voice to and assumptions they want to challenge. The course provides a space in which to do that.
Harris: I have interviewed people who have a lot of those really early images and have family stories that are attached to them. For other images, orphan images, there might not be as much information. I might encounter them in an archive. I have the enormous privilege to be on faculty at Yale University, which has the Beinecke Library and photographic archive, and there are certain areas of specialities that they have. So, over the course of just my very short time there, I've been able to experience and research different types of images, and I'm looking forward to doing even more. I teach courses in which I provide a platform for my students to examine their own family photographic archives and remix them, in terms of the way in which they're framing them, the way they see them, but also contextualize them with public archives. A significant number of students that take my classes are first or second generation Americans, or some of them are biracial, and it’s wonderful to see how they use this kind of remixing, or this rereading of images, using the family album in creative ways to begin to work out some of these questions that they wanted to give voice to and assumptions they want to challenge. The course provides a space in which to do that.
Trailer for Family Pictures USA
TiP: The emotional extremes are expressed in the individual image, but in this idea of the remix, because it's the sequencing of them in a way through which these emotions are conveyed. What are some these emotional extremes that come through in family pictures?
Harris: One of the emotional extremes I’ve observed is confronting internalized feelings of shame. A shame of not conforming to a dominant narrative. One of my students this past year has never seen her parents kiss. There's not an image in her family album of her parents kissing. She's second generation Ethiopian-American. She is a young woman who is in her late teens, early twenties, who is trying to understand herself as an American, and the dominant images that she sees within popular culture, images of heterosexual romance, don't jibe with the way she's been raised. It produced a certain sense of shame, because her parents could not conform to the prevalent representation of a happy, loving couple that one sees in Hollywood, on television, in advertising, etc., even though they were one. And so, she was able to resolve her ambivalence around how her family chose to represent themselves culturally, with regards to this issue of expressions of love and what it means to represent love in an image.
One of my other students, one parent comes from China, the other one comes from a Korean family. And so, there's always been this sense of conflict. They had a Chinese wedding that was documented, and then the next day a Korean wedding that was also documented. Each had its own rituals, performance and protocols. So how does this person, who belongs to both communities, in addition to being American, representationally navigate these things? Oftentimes we find ourselves in an either/or situation, which we're all suffering from politically right now. In order for my truth to be valid, it means that the other truth has to be invalid. Working creatively with family photographs allows for a multi-dimensional view of family and identity.
I think that other kinds of emotional responses involve a reconciliation around what a parent or ancestor might have sacrificed to ensure a better future for the family. There is depth of feelings around this. In America, we don't necessarily talk about our feelings. Now, post-pandemic, people ask how you are doing, and there tends to be a little bit more discussion and honest sharing. People are more willing to share what's going on, and one's relationship to others, to people that you love. With Family Pictures USA we provide a mechanism for strangers to go deep into these feelings and vulnerability around a set of stories, which I think is pretty phenomenal. And you see that a lot. The tears flow when people talk about their images. I think a lot of people hold these feelings, but don't often have a mechanism to share them, and our project allows for that space - a secular, yet sacred space.
Harris: One of the emotional extremes I’ve observed is confronting internalized feelings of shame. A shame of not conforming to a dominant narrative. One of my students this past year has never seen her parents kiss. There's not an image in her family album of her parents kissing. She's second generation Ethiopian-American. She is a young woman who is in her late teens, early twenties, who is trying to understand herself as an American, and the dominant images that she sees within popular culture, images of heterosexual romance, don't jibe with the way she's been raised. It produced a certain sense of shame, because her parents could not conform to the prevalent representation of a happy, loving couple that one sees in Hollywood, on television, in advertising, etc., even though they were one. And so, she was able to resolve her ambivalence around how her family chose to represent themselves culturally, with regards to this issue of expressions of love and what it means to represent love in an image.
One of my other students, one parent comes from China, the other one comes from a Korean family. And so, there's always been this sense of conflict. They had a Chinese wedding that was documented, and then the next day a Korean wedding that was also documented. Each had its own rituals, performance and protocols. So how does this person, who belongs to both communities, in addition to being American, representationally navigate these things? Oftentimes we find ourselves in an either/or situation, which we're all suffering from politically right now. In order for my truth to be valid, it means that the other truth has to be invalid. Working creatively with family photographs allows for a multi-dimensional view of family and identity.
I think that other kinds of emotional responses involve a reconciliation around what a parent or ancestor might have sacrificed to ensure a better future for the family. There is depth of feelings around this. In America, we don't necessarily talk about our feelings. Now, post-pandemic, people ask how you are doing, and there tends to be a little bit more discussion and honest sharing. People are more willing to share what's going on, and one's relationship to others, to people that you love. With Family Pictures USA we provide a mechanism for strangers to go deep into these feelings and vulnerability around a set of stories, which I think is pretty phenomenal. And you see that a lot. The tears flow when people talk about their images. I think a lot of people hold these feelings, but don't often have a mechanism to share them, and our project allows for that space - a secular, yet sacred space.
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Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, Philadelphia, 2016. Courtesy Thomas Allen Harris
Family Pictures USA, 2018. Everglades, Southwest Florida. Courtesy Thomas Allen Harris
