A few months ago the Banner folks asked me to write a guest post. I was flattered and agreed to do so (nobody’s ever asked me before!), and then promptly got busy with other stuff. But here I finally am.
Image may be NSFW.
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Yep, that’s me and my children, yesterday. After Stake Conference we went on a hike at a nearby nature preserve, racing the season’s first winter front to the bottom of the gully where we stopped for this photo and an impromptu bathroom break.
I was going to call this post “The Lacanian Rhetoric of the Family Photo,” but decided that would make me seem like an irritating theory show-off. It’s hard to hide your true nature for long, though, especially around here, so I’m not going to try anymore.
If one is going to show off on the subject of family photos, the obvious place to start is by pointing out that, although I really was there with my kids, we really did crouch and smile among the leaves, the photo nevertheless constructs the family in a particular—and particularly artificial—way. The direct, full-face pose, the centered composition and sharp focus, the clustered faces with their unison smiles—they all tell us that the family is an inevitable and transparent social construct, at the center of human institutions and experience, transcendently free of context and history. When the camera goes back in the bag, of course, I walk out of the frame, the kids start arguing, and the family takes its place in history as a pliable, painful, particular social arrangement.
Don’t be too impressed with the foregoing, because it’s not a profound point, and it might not even be correct. It’s more interesting, I think, to consider the ways in which the photograph constructs not the family but the viewer. All photography insinuates the viewer into the scene as the absent presence whose gaze calls the scene into existence. But family portraiture in particular, with its open pose and smiling face and earnestness, positively invites the viewer in: go ahead, cross the bridge, walk through the middle distance and up the path out of the frame with us.
It’s all a ruse, though, and, like it or not, you’re complicit. Someone really did stand there with the camera, but it wasn’t you, even though the photo claims it was. Photography, the truth-teller of the artistic media, is also the most outrageous liar. It’s a beautiful lie, though, the implied viewer, the invitation, the smiling family, all of it. It’s the absence that end-stops lines of poetry, the Imaginary that holds the Real, the lack that feeds desire. Come on, everybody, say cheese.
