Thinking about Julia Hirsch's Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect, she sees the family photograph as a democratization. Analyzing the history of family photography, especially Renaissance portraiture and going to the evolution of family portraiture to what we now know as snapshots originating from Kodak. Hirsch then illustrates found and lost family photographs.
Since my work is particularly from found photographs of domestic living I have been interested in both the snapshot and the space that is inhabited in these domestic settings. I've been looking at Patrick Wright's On Living in an Old Country:The National Past in Contemporary Britain, though I am primarily looking at the U.S. his ideas made it a good read. Wright is looking at how history can residue in societies contemporary everyday life, which then reflects people's certain identity and life. The rich introduction to such ideas on nostalgia and everyday life specifically related to Britain. A nations history relating to the family memories and its core identity. I've been thinking and relating these thoughts to the U.S.'s family structure and cultural idealism. If fusing one's own family history/ family memories and stories with the collective memory of the historical consciousness of the nation will those memories conflict or conjoin with one another. The concept of nationhood seems to be active as the same concepts of family idealism and the standards of a family culture. The remembering shared by families along with nationhoods memory are closely related and influence one another, even by just thinking of words such as "homeland" and "motherland", the memory of home and nation do get mixed together. Also looked at Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, by Benedict Anderson on these thoughts.
