As a unique branch of domestic photography, family photographs comprise a substantial body of archeological archive. Artifacts of both personal and collective consciousness, they reveal and actively create social spaces. They are simultaneously pieces of remembrance and active agents in the construction of home localities. Within that already massive body of photographic material, migrant family photos inhabit a separate sphere unique to the processes of travel and movement. The dual function of family photos connecting them to both past and present spaces manifests in these images of migration. A simple token from a father, a crumpled photograph of himself abroad, therefore embodies more than mere sentiment in the hands of his son. The photograph contains a symbolic heartbeat previously absent from the fragmented house and redefines the home itself.
In Barbara Wolbert’s essay entitled “The Visual Production of Locality: Turkish Family Pictures, Migration and the Creation of Virtual Neighborhoods,” she contests previous archeological methodology and discourse of migrant family portraits which relegate these objects to evidence of the past, or “temporal references” (2001, 1). This situates the object as static artifact, instead of as a fluid agent of locality which Wolbert will propose. When considering the photographs, the emphasis on materiality and mediality (Kuhn 1995; Hirsch 1997) marks them as signifiers and not stories. It is from this approach that Wolbert investigates the family portraits of the Costum family as a sample dissection of Turkish immigrants and the changing notions of social spaces evidenced in their photographs. Wolbert therefore analyzes the photographs as mental maps of “migration, de-territorialization, and displacement” (2004, 3). To borrow from the terminology of Ethnic Studies, these photographs therefore possess an adaptive vitality in their malleable state, and therefore hold the necessary ability to retain original culture, deemed in Wolbert’s article as the “production of locality” (2004, 1).
The case study of Ilyas and Perihan Costum reveals this adaptive vitality as achieved through photographic correspondence. While Ilyas was working abroad in Berlin, he sent photographs to his family in Turkey. Despite the physical separation of the family and their nuclear head, the photographs acted as a placebo for the father’s presence. Wolbert describes how the stylistic apparatus of the photographs themselves reveal this function, with neutral poses and inconsequential backgrounds that seem to only give proof of life (2004, 7). The photographs speak of displacement, not assimilation, and there is no performance or story being described. This type of correspondence is representative of a “cult of unity,” wherein visual practices are ritual practices (Wolbert 2004, 4).
A second type of image-driven ritual emerges when looking at video documentation of ceremonies such as Turkish weddings and circumcision parties. The rise of accessibility of home videos in the 1980’s gave way to this style of documentation, which brings a new level sensory engagement in the spectator. As opposed to photographs, which are physical objects to be touched, videos engage the audience physically and almost transport the spectator into the action of the film, and, Wolbert concludes, the video “transmits the original event’s rituality” (2004, 11). The videos can be mailed to anyone on the globe, the most distant of relatives and friends. Watching home movies with one’s family is ritualized, and the audience is indoctrinated into the event, and therefore, the family. This type of ritual transcends physical location, and thus creates what is called a virtual locality. This type of interaction also raises modern comparisons to the rise of virtual communities on the internet, such as Facebook, Myspace, etc. in that actual physical location is negotiated, and instead the individual can identify themselves as a certain nationality or family in the click of a button.
Additionally, in these terms, watching home movies contrasts theories of film spectatorship which describe a passive spectator. Furthermore, it is interesting to apply this theory to watching documentary films composed of personal video footage. Does the audience therefore become akin to the people onscreen as ritual commands and as demanded by this intimate exchange?
Andrew Jarecki’s 2003 documentary, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, comes to mind as a problematic case of this type of spectorial engagement. The film follows an upper-middle class, suburban Jewish family discovered to be running an underground child pornography operation in their family basement. Despite the spectacular nature of the crime, the documentary is peculiar because it employs only the use of the Friedman family home videos, taken before, during, and after criminal indictment. Besides aligning the private movies as performance, the film also presents a difficult perspective wherein the spectator is aligned with the guilty perspective of the family, and I would argue the audience is therefore incriminated by ritual. However, an essential difference between watching home movies via documentaries versus videos sent from a relative is that of the personal attachment to the people onscreen and actually recognizing family relatives you have met before. This perhaps is the essential link between viewer and film that marks home movies as ritual. Nonetheless, an audience may be moved into feeling at closer intimacy with any individual who shares “home movies,” and it is their power that the filmmaker knowingly employs or exploits.
The ability of film and photography to represent, document, and notably create history and personal experience makes the medium unique. An entire community can be described or imagined in photographs. Glenn Willumson also describes the active agency of photographs, theorizing: “Moving through time and across our cultural horizon, manifesting themselves at different moments and in diverse places, photographs are marked by their trajectory” (2004, 62). In this way, photographs reveal multiple biographies depending on location and person. Alice James’s study of Greek refugee photographs following the Treaty of Lausanne and the “Greek Catastrophe” presents a case study of this process of locality and history creation via photography. James describes how fugitives create communities in the shared spirit of cultural preservation, evidenced and supported by their personal photographs. These photographs are described by the family as belonging to the Greek Turkey diaspora called Mikrasiates, created from the forced expulsion of the Greek populations in the early twentieth cenutry. No longer inhabiting the area known as Anatolia, their personal histories become the national history, and their old photographs create and maintain that history.
In her writing, however, James situates the family photographs as a remembrance of the past, linking the photos to a separate place (Anatolia) and thus creating what Wolbert called an “irritated sense of place” (2004, 8). In the accompanying photographs taken by Barbara Smith, she asked the refugees to hold a photo of themselves from their past. This further “irritates” the displacement because it denotes a change of locality visible through comparing the old photo to the present day environment. The viewer cannot decide which space is the appropriate “home.” However, in the action of sharing those photographic histories, visually and orally, the refugees create their new virtual locality of Mikrasiates (Greeks from Asia Minor,) within both historical and personal consciousness. If the photographs are not viewed as memories of the past but instead as components for the creation of the new virtual neighborhood, documenting these photographic histories is essential.
Constructing localities and homes requires a shared ritual, and photographic mediums physically engage the senses in this way. Virtual or physical, imagined or remembered, photographs and films have the ability to generate entire nations or simply family households. Therefore, truth and representation are relative when society deems necessary.
Works Cited
James, Alice, and Barbara Smith. 2000. “The Mirror of Their Past: Greek Refugee Photographs and Memories of Anatolia.” Visual Anthropology Review 16: 25-42.
Willumson, Glenn. 2004. “Making Meaning: Displaced Materiality in the Library and Art Museum.” Photographic Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. (Eds) E. Edwards & J. Hart. London: Routledge.
Wolbert, Barbara. 2001. “The Visual Production of Locality: Turkish Family Pictures, Migration and the Creation of Virtual Neighborhoods.” Visual Anthropology Review 17: 21-35.
