Writing Photography

I delivered this invited talk as part of the lecture series Writing Photography, hosted at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.In this talk I discussed the politics of family photography through imagery taken in Israel. Looking at collections of family photographs that have been used both in the domestic and the public spheres, I explored the interrelationship between the politically contested circumstances in Israel, and the various ways that family photography enters the political realm. Rather than seeing Israelis as either victims or victors, I considered how members of the Israeli community use family photography to face as well as negotiate their daily reality. While some in Israel use these photographs as platforms on which to project their social position and place themselves within history, many are in fact used as expressions of resentment and resistance to the state. I also explained how family photographs encompass the complex relationship Israelis have with themselves, with their own experience of the past and their constructed past and, above all, with the state