Un)expected Families at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts,
Portraits At The MFA Question What Family Looks Similar 04:21
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It'south that time of the year when holiday cards with pictures of smiling, posing, frolicking families make their way to our mailboxes.
Now an exhibition at Boston'south Museum of Fine Arts, aptly titled "(un)expected families," is exploring how photographers take called to represent loved ones — and the concept of family through an alternative lens.
The exhibition'south gallery feels very domestic. Groups of photos hang on the walls — different sizes, colors, formats and frames — like you'd see in a living room or hallway.
MFA curator Karen Haas confirms that evocation is absolutely intentional.
"Photographers from the very beginning have been fascinated by the manner that the camera could capture images of loved ones, freeze them in time," she says. "They form sort of reliquaries of memory, and these sorts of relationships to the objects — that idea of the photograph as a talisman-like object I think has been somewhat forgotten in our contemporary world."
Haas walks over to the oldest of the more than 80 works in the exhibition: a sepia-toned daguerreotype of triplets from the 1850s Boston photography duo Southworth & Hawes. It'southward displayed in a glass example next to Polaroids Andy Warhol took of the Kennedy family unit on vacation.
A few paces away Haas points out a kind of counter epitome to that idealized Starting time Family. It's past creative person Nan Goldin, who attended what is now chosen the Schoolhouse of the Museum of Fine Arts in the 1970s.
The curator calls Goldin a "Boston main" and says the artist'southward upbringing was troubled. And then she constitute herself a surrogate family.
"In this case, two of her drag queen friends in New York City," Haas explains, "who are members of that group that she felt, and really thought of, as neither male person nor female only of a sort of 3rd gender. She was fascinated, drawn to them. They to her. And she photographed them in an incredibly loving and beautiful way."
One half of the couple looks directly at the photographer'south lens. Trust beams through mascara-coated eyes.
There's a quote from the artist on the gallery label to the right of the photograph that Haas says is particularly cute and poignant when you consider that much of Goldin's community was ravaged by the AIDS epidemic:
I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. But in fact my pictures show me just how much I've lost.
While Goldin found family in outsider culture, other photographers in the exhibition explore what it's like to be an outsider in your own family. Maynard-based artist Caleb Cole probes the concept in his photograph series titled "Odd One Out."
"How do y'all know when you fit somewhere or when you feel like you belong?" he asks during a phone conversation nigh his work. "What does belonging mean? Do y'all ever arrive at belonging, or is belonging something y'all are like constantly struggling to maintain?"
For an epitome hanging in the MFA show, Cole manipulated an abandoned photograph he constitute in a thrift shop. There'due south a mom in bed, dad past her side and they're handing a newborn baby to a bleak-looking sibling. Just Cole edited everyone out except for the new big sister — leaving her surrounded by white, cut-out human forms.
"The expect on her confront to me very much said, 'I thought I understood my identify, I idea I understood my function, I thought I understood where I fit and that I was the only child,' " Cole says of the young daughter in his piece. "Now I accept to renegotiate my role and how I fit. I don't know how I experience near that."
Cole, who'south 36 now, says he tin chronicle to that existential defoliation.
"I was the older sibling and take a younger blood brother," he mused, "so that probably happened to me too."
For the exhibition Haas assembled an array of images from the MFA'due south trove of photographs, from outside collectors and past shepherding 21 new acquisitions (viii from New England artists).
There are large-calibration pictures of families around the kitchen table and in the family car -- arenas ripe for meeting, for connecting and, of course, for inevitable family drama.
Virtual families are plumbed, too, in Maine-based artist Tanja Hollander's photographs. She spent five years tracking down hundreds of Facebook friends then she could meet them and take their pictures. (Her project is currently on display at MASS MoCA in N Adams.)
Haas' goal in creating this evidence is to illustrate how broad and diverse family unit configurations can exist — without defining them.
"The families that we're born into, generational families," she describes, "but likewise romantic unions, couples and chosen families — families we take chosen for ourselves."
And that includes the military and the church building, Haas says.
"I call up the family is such a basic social construct — so basic to and then many of our lives — that I promise that these kinds of images volition really resonate with people."
Visitor Sharon Gordetsky thinks these photographs will speak to the people while emphasizing the importance of looking closely at images of family.
"Pictures that can exist seen — and tin be studied — rather than just on a computer or but on a cell telephone," she emphasizes.
Gordetsky is a family psychologist and former president of the Massachusetts Psychological Lodge. As she tours the bear witness she says it has the potential to spark valuable conversations — especially during the holidays — which can exist rough on families that aren't "traditional" or picture-perfect.
"It's and so wonderful — for kids and everyone — to come up and say you're a family even if y'all're non genetically related, biologically related. You are a family," she says.
Curator Karen Haas invites visitors to write about their ain "(un)expected families" on response cards in the gallery that will be archived at the museum.
And she adds they tin and should include any family member — and so she shows me i of her personal favorite photos. In it, there's a mother, a father ... and a canis familiaris.
"(un)expected families" is at the Museum of Fine Arts through June 17, 2018.
Source: https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/12/20/unexpected-family-photographs-mfa
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