Picturing the Family

Media, Narrative, Memory

Silke Arnold-de Simine, Joanne Leal, Silke Arnold-de Simine, Joanne Leal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Whether pasted into an album, framed or shared on social media, the family photograph simultaneously offers a private and public insight into the identity and past of its subject. Long considered a model for understanding individual identity, the idea of the family has increasingly formed the basis for exploring collective pasts and cultural memory. Picturing the Family investigates how visual representations of the family reveal both personal and shared histories, evaluating the testimonial and social value of photography and film.Combining academic and creative, practice-based approaches, this collection of essays introduces a dialogue between scholars and artists working at the intersection between family, memory and visual media. Many of the authors are both researchers and practitioners, whose chapters engage with their own work and that of others, informed by critical frameworks. From the act of revisiting old, personal photographs to the sale of family albums through internet auction, the twelve chapters each present a different collection of photographs or artwork as case studies for understanding how these visual representations of the family perform memory and identity. Building on extensive research into family photographs and memory, the book considers the implications of new cultural forms for how the family is perceived and how we relate to the past. While focusing on the forms of visual representation, above all photographs, the authors also reflect on the contextualization and 'remediation' of photography in albums, films, museums and online.

1
That Other Woman: The Woman Who Accompanied the Cold War Tourist to Paris

Martha Langford

Freud makes a second mistake in believing with Lichtenberg that paternity, and it alone, is as uncertain as the question of whether the moon is inhabited: we know today, in all objective certainty, that the moon is uninhabited, and, conversely, it is easier to see and to touch that satellite’s soil than the certain identity of a mother.

JACQUES DERRIDA, ARCHIVE FEVER: A FREUDIAN IMPRESSION (1995: 48)

Having children is not all it’s cracked up to be. LUCILLE LANGFORD, TO HER DAUGHTER MARTHA, C. 1990

Photographic art and literature are populated with mysterious others, often mothers, who physically and/or symbolically embody the memory work of the authors. Strategies of appropriation, whether from the archive or the flea market, are the makings of these fictional creatures. The vernacular turn in contemporary photographic art has created what I have elsewhere described as ‘strange bedfellows’: the amateur photographer and the avant-garde artist; the domestic photographic collection, with its roots in the history of a particular family, and the public work of art, an assemblage of alienated or found photographs that appeals to the collective unconscious (Langford 2008). A formulaic snapshot of a mother is easily unmoored from its circumstances; not unlike the actual mother, the photographic figure of the mother is hard-working. As a personification, ‘she’ may symbolize birth, death or infinity. As a human flagpole, ‘she’ may stand for nationhood and ideology; as a pillar of her community, ‘she’ may represent class, ethnicity, religious affiliation or any combination of social constructions, including the nuclear family. ‘Her’ depiction in a particular setting may cast those surroundings in an aura of familiarity, authenticity and connectedness. In all of these figurations, ‘she’ is both ‘mother’ and ‘motherhood’, both emblem and architect of the family. The metaphysical, the metaphoric, the metonymic, the material and the maternal form a strange compact indeed, though one that twenty-first-century photographic studies has normalized by dint of repetition.

Mindful of that phenomenon, this chapter turns to a small set of Kodachrome slides taken of my mother, Lucille Langford (1921–2000), by my father, Warren Langford (1919–1997), in May and June 1963. These images are drawn from a larger corpus of some 200 slides examined by John Langford and myself in A Cold War Tourist and His Camera (2011). None of the photographs to be discussed here were treated, or even mentioned, in our book. Picturing the Family, conceived under the constellation of media, narrative and memory, gives me a second chance to consider the reasons for this omission, and what the translation of these private photographs to the public sphere adds to the history of Cold War experience. The daughter’s tale – my own – cannot be neglected, and it too will figure, at two degrees of retrospection, as the story unfolds.

First, let me reinstate the photographs, which are, as advertised, both ordinary and strange. Here represented in the typical fashion of seeing-and-being-seen wife by unseen-and-all-seeing husband is a Canadian couple enjoying the sights of London and Paris. These portraits of my mother are images of staged tourism, set against instantly recognizable, atmospheric and storied backgrounds. Part of their interpretation rests on our middle-class family’s ordinary aspirations, here again strikingly hybrid – the educational benefits of travel and the romantic myth of bohemian rambling. Family albums and slide shows were made for this. But the circumstances of this trip rather complicate the conversation. A career public servant, Warren Langford had spent the 1962–1963 academic year studying at the National Defence College (NDC) in Kingston, Ontario. Founded in 1947, the NDC was both creation and instrument of the Cold War, its curriculum designed to prepare a select cohort of Canadian, British and US military and civilian personnel for the possibility that the Cold War might turn hot. The programme featured interaction with military, diplomatic, commercial and administrative specialists, and visits to Western defence installations or places of interest, the cohort, travelling together in North America, then divided into two groups for the seven-week Overseas tours, one half going to Africa and Europe, the other to the Middle East and Asia. For ten months, thirty promising mid-career men bonded over fearsome possibilities and international opportunities.

The NDC was a photographic culture. North American and Overseas tours were designed to confirm impressions gained in the classroom and photography served to preserve those fleeting impressions and disseminate them to others. Participants were encouraged with the idea of seeing for themselves and photographic technology was understood as an extension of that surveying eye. Warren Langford took up photography in that spirit as a Cold Warrior-in-training. The study conducted by his political scientist son and art historian daughter traced the Afro-European tour through Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Italy and Germany. That story ended with a curious trans-political encounter in an East Berlin parking lot where pictures, not spies, were exchanged (Langford and Langford 2001).

But the Overseas tour did not end at the Berlin Wall. It continued to Brussels, London, and Paris. On this leg of the journey, the Afro-European travellers were not only reunited with the Middle East and Asia group but also, if they so desired, with their loved ones. Only one of the participants’ wives chose to join the tour in Brussels. That was Lucille Langford, on her very first trip to Europe. There were no photographs taken in Brussels (21–23 May), which is perhaps understandable given the long transatlantic flight, the short weekday stay, and the couple’s long separation, but quite a few pictures were taken on ‘free days’ in London (May 25–26) and Paris (June 1–2), and these are no more touristic than the Moroccan or Italian views. Nevertheless, we left them out, and for two (we thought) persuasive reasons. The first was preserving the dual identity of the Cold War Tourist as public and private man: these pictures tilted the balance in favour of the private. The second went to the very nature of our process, which was the extraction of invisibilities. In Verona and Venice, for example, we knew that the Cold Warriors-in-training were being shown things that they could not photograph – the plazas, statues and gondolas became placeholders for the bases and missiles nearby. They were in that sense functionally metonymic, Piazza San Marco, aflutter with pigeons, standing for Italy as a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and host to its nuclear firepower. This pattern of substitution or transposition was endemic to the Cold War – consider, for example, the artificial domestic setting of the so-called Kitchen Debate between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon during their tour of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959. The photo-opportunity ‘image’ as propagandistic cover had been tabled in American historian Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1961), a barbed and elitist social critique that anticipated postmodernism’s attack on spectacle and hyper-reality. Richard H. Rovere’s ‘Journal of a Pseudo-event’, published in The New Yorker (July 1963) unpacked the staged statesmanship of US President John F. Kennedy’s spring tour of Europe, including his speech at the Berlin Wall. What John Langford and I did not see is that photographs of my mother were performing the same substitutive function – the creation of the public man was also the creation of the public woman, and vice versa.

In our corpus, the Cold War factor further refined what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had designated ‘le photographiable’, while our framework answered his call for a phenomenology of photographic experience (1963: 291). Our concept of photographic experience included all the social actors (human and non-human) that dramaturgical interactionist theory might dream of, as well as the ‘incalculable variations on photographic dissemination in the seeing, describing, remembering, and misremembering (or reimagining) of the image’ (Langford and Langford 2011: 155). Nervousness, inhibition, distraction and incompetence, proven by the absence of pictures, were admitted into evidence, for as we know, verbal captioning – the oral-photographic performance of the slide show – is typically enriched by stories of the ones that got away. Near-misses, explications and alibis also belong to ‘photographic culture, its protocols, and its ethics: situations are coloured by the way they do or do not lend themselves to be photographed. Those that do not have to be remembered in other ways’ (Langford and Langford 2001: 155). Those ‘other ways’ may be stories as they bubble up in the performative presentation of photographs; they may be backstories constructed from archival research. A Cold War Tourist and His Camera was the quickening and materialization of those ‘other ways’, though what comes clear to me now is their predetermination and effect. Our Cold War plot – our narrative structure – was much strengthened, we thought, by ending the play just before the wife/mother came on the scene. Still thinking about those pictures, I am left with a doubled task of reconsideration: reconstituting the corpus and reconciling with the ghost of my mother.

The simplest thing would be to show that these ordinary touristic shots of Lucille Langford at the Tower of London and Montmartre are pendants to the Cold War Tourist’s photographic possession of the world. They are, and I will. But grafting them onto the book (the missing chapter!) explains nothing of their interest and enduring power, to the daughter at least, as vernacular photographs, lost and found. For these photographs return to me along many paths. The circumstances of their taking are both intriguing and poignant; they were legendary in the making – they spun much repeated family lore. At the same time, they are doubly formulaic, as touristic clichés and frank imitations of portraits of the elite circulated in mass-media publications – looking at these images, it is more than reasonable to suggest that my mother followed fashion in her choice of dress and her camera behaviour. My title’s reference to Kennedy’s famous quip – that he was the man who had accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris – intends to evoke the mimicry that the photogenic couple inspired.¹ Part of my analysis rests on Lucille Langford’s conscious emulation and its contagious effects. But the Camelot balloon has long been pricked and my mother’s image now rises with the tide of current fascination with pictures of anonymous women. Her appeals to the camera place her in a vast sisterhood of posing women, whose repurposed images float in collective memory as works of art. These strong currents of photographic experience both bring me my mother and take her from me.

London and Paris 1963

In the Cold War tourist’s slide show, the first glimpse of his wife is at considerable distance.² Lucille Langford stands miniaturized at the entrance to Westminster Cathedral, a Roman Catholic church of Neo-Byzantine design, consecrated in 1910 (Figure 1.1). The striped façade and prominent mosaic of Christ enthroned take nothing from the figure of interest, perfectly framed in front of the closed centre door. While worshippers entering to the right suggest that a mass is about to begin, something about Lucille Langford’s stately pose suggests that she has already attended and taken communion.

FIGURE 1.1 Warren Langford, Westminster Cathedral, London, 26 May 1963.

The next photograph is less focused on London and more on her: a portrait that shows off her costume and her shapely legs (Figure 1.2). She is wearing a skirted suit in viridian green, a dark shade of spring green, the colour of renewal and hope, and quite becoming to a brunette. The cut of the suit conforms almost perfectly to the leading style of the day – the Jackie-look as performed by the American First Lady on her 1961 state visit to Canada (Figure ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 That Other Woman: The Woman Who Accompanied the Cold War Tourist to Paris
• 2 Memory, Subjectivity and Maternal Histories in Un’Ora Sola Ti Vorrei (2002), Histoire d’un Secret (2003) and On the Border (2012)
• 3 Soviet Heroes and Jewish Victims: One Family’s Memories of the Second World War
• 4 Visual Meditations: An Island in Time – (Re)interpreting Family Albums and Oral Histories
• 5 Performing Familial Memory in Against
• 6 In and Out of Focus: Visualizing Loss through the Family Album
• 7 The (Re)constructed Self in the Safe Space of the Family Photograph: Chino Otsuka’s Imagine Finding Me (2005)
• 8 A Place for Memory: Family Photo Collections, Social Media and the Imaginative Reconstruction of the Working-Class Neighbourhood
• 9 Wanted – New Custodians for Family Photographs: Vernacular Photographs on eBay and the Album as Artwork
• 10 Dislocating Memory: Family Photographs in Story-Centred Museums
• Bibliography
• Index