Making up the Family Album

Family Ties Network: Subject Missing is the first Family Ties Network (FTN) event to be hosted at the Glasgow School of Art. It asks how can lens-based practices investigate physical absences of parental/maternal figures and move beyond current representations of the missing or the lost within the ‘family’? Guest speakers are invited to bring both personal, autobiographical experiences and distinct methodological approaches demonstrated in their recent work to help discuss this question. The event includes an opportunity for GSA students to show portfolios of work that also explore the theme of 'subject missing' within the family. I presented a paper on the reconstruction of the Family Album What happens of one is to reconstruct a family album? How are the individuals portrayed and disseminated through the silent photograph? If one is to make a family album from reclaimed material what can be discovered? If the family album is a symbolically structure of a carefully contrived view of everyday life, what happens when the elements of its construction is edited by the flow of history. Through a journey to the archive of relatives and public records I propose a new type of family album - one that exists between two archives - the personal and the public, where the individuals portrayed are constantly shifting, resisting the fixed nature of the photograph