In this guest post, Block Museum 2023-24 Graduate Interdisciplinary Fellow Madison Brown writes about the works on view in her exhibition A Little Truth: Fact and Fiction in Family Photography.

A Little Truth: Fact and Fiction in Family Photography presents snapshots from The Block’s collection side-by-side with work by artists who have incorporated family photographs into their artwork. The exhibit invites us to reflect on how memories, realities, and complexities often lie beneath the facades of family photography. 

The title, A Little Truth, comes from Roland Barthes’s 1980 book, Camera Lucida. Written in two parts, Camera Lucida is a general reflection on the nature of photography, followed by a more personal exploration of photography. Mourning the recent loss of his mother, Barthes describes his attempt to locate his mother’s essence in snapshot photographs taken of her throughout her life. Barthes says, “The Photograph gives a little truth, on condition that it parcels out the body” (103). That is, a photograph might show us a face, a shoulder, the front or back of a person. It only gives us that “little truth,” but not the whole truth—at least, not at once.

Likewise, family photographs give a little truth. The time it takes to snap a photo on film is one second or less, giving us that particular moment, but little more. Photographs cannot give us everything that led up to that one moment, what else was happening in the world at that moment, and all the feelings and memories that shape the way we understand that moment.  

Watch – Madison Brown on A Little Truth: Fact and Fiction in Family Photography

The snapshots in the show were gifted to the museum in 2019 by Peter Cohen, a New York-based collector of vernacular and everyday photography who has donated portions of his collection to art museums across the country. 

Instead of functioning as private documents of family memory, family photos that are part of an art museum collection function as historical artifacts of private image-making cultures and everyday life. Even though they are not our own family photos and we are only able to access a little truth, they may nevertheless awaken our own memories or guide us to empathize with someone else’s. 

The snapshots in white frames create a literal throughline in the exhibition, guiding our exploration of what we can and cannot know from anonymous snapshots. They also provide a larger visual context for the artworks that they punctuate.  

The snapshots show us what people took pictures of in the 20th century, the kinds of events where snapshots were taken, how people posed, what they wore. In many ways, most of us are already versed in identifying these kinds of details from the proliferation of everyday images on our phones and on social media. 

But although the imagery may be similar, I want to point out an important distinction between the snapshots in this exhibit and the digital images that circulate today: analog photographs are not just images. The materiality of these snapshots—the gloss of the photo paper, their size, thickness, scalloped edges—are not insignificant features. The fact that they were carried in wallets, sent in the mail, and proudly displayed in homes speaks to their thing-ness.  

In the gallery, one can see the way the edges curl, the small folds or scratches in the photopaper, how the color has faded or become saturated over time. These everyday objects have become relics in today’s digital landscape, and they have a lot to tell us about the ways that people have always consciously curated memories, even long before Instagram filters. 

A recurring question throughout the exhibit is the matter of perspective: in particular, who is taking the photograph, who is pictured in the photograph, and who is looking at the photograph—in many cases, us.  

In the very first snapshot, a black and white photograph shows two people wearing shorts, standing on the latticed front porch of a house with white siding. They stand with their backs to the photographer, looking through a screen door together at something we cannot see. For me, the intersection of perspectives in this snapshot captures the spirit of family photography. The photographer is capturing a private domestic moment; the couple pictured are looking into the house, seeing and experiencing the moment in a way that the photographer cannot; and we, too, are on the outside, viewing these intersecting perspectives in an anonymous context. 

No matter how hard, or long, or lovingly we look, there will always be more truth, another truth, an unknown truth, just outside of the frame.

No matter how hard, or long, or lovingly we look, there will always be more truth, another truth, an unknown truth, just outside of the frame. And this is just as true of our own family photos as those of people we do not know. But the fact that we cannot know is not a failure; rather, I believe it is a feature of family photography, because not knowing provides space for the interpretive and imaginative faculties of memory to do their work. 

Women’s Advocates, St. Paul  is a work from Donna Ferrato’s series Living with the Enemy, a decades-long project that recorded women’s experiences of domestic violence and its effects on their families. In this photograph, Ferrato captures a mother and her two children sitting on a bed in a women’s shelter, holding a framed family portrait that they brought with them when they left home.  

Ferrato is a documentary photographer, and the series that this photograph comes from includes many more explicit images of domestic violence, including scenes from a hospital emergency room and a funeral home. This photograph, while more subdued, is no less powerful. The family portrait held at the center of this photograph evokes the facade of familial bliss that is commonly associated with family photography: a nuclear family is standing close together, dressed up nicely, smiling happily. But as the surrounding context of this photograph shows, there is more to the story.   

When I refer to a facade in family photography, I am not suggesting that such performances of happiness or trying to look one’s best are “fake.” It’s increasingly common in our social media landscape to want other people to see our lives in a particular way and curate appearances, but the kind of facade that I refer to isn’t even necessarily for the sake of an audience. The facade that I refer to first and foremost structures the way we want to see ourselves; the way we need to see ourselves. This isn’t lying. At the root of it, there’s something very real. 

Here, the mother and her two children are the subjects of Ferrato’s photo in the shelter, as well as viewers of their own family portrait. The intersection of these perspectives demonstrates the psychological power of family photography. Even in so dark a moment as having to leave home due to violence, this family brought their family portrait—a symbol of closeness and togetherness that includes their husband and father—because sometimes we need to believe in closeness and togetherness, especially in moments of pain. 

The photograph that is the basis of this piece comes from a bag of anonymous German family photos from the 1940s found by artist Michael Schwab. In this work, Schwab enlarges one of the found photographs, showing two children smiling in leotards. The background of the photograph shows greenery, fencing, and an industrial landscape beyond. The image of the children is then overlaid with handwritten text from the back of the photograph. The German annotation reads: “The great gymnasts of Heidberg with the “banana-bellies.”  

Schwab’s act of superimposing the text from the back of the photo on top of the image plays with notions of content and context in family photography. Normally the text written on the back of snapshots gives some context to the image on the front: names, dates, places, anecdotes—things that we couldn’t know just from looking at the image alone. 

Here, Schwab gives us both at once—image content and anecdotal context—but there is still a significant gap in our knowledge that makes the title of Schwab’s series, Remembering, so poignant: even if we know that the photo is from Germany in the 1940s, and we view these innocent smiling children against the historical context of World War II, we simply cannot know how they were affected.

Schwab’s work was the inspiration for my curatorial decision to include some handwritten captions on the backs of snapshots in this exhibition. Many of the snaps in The Block’s collection have writing on their backs. Some of my favorites in the show read: “Keep this forever if you love me,” and a cheeky one, “Mary Ann Wilson, 1948. What a great dame. We have known each other since we were 6 in 1932. Used to play Dr and Nurse as kids. Now it is more than playing!”  

Unlike Schwab’s artistic intervention to show us both content and context at once, the materiality of these snapshots means that, when we read the writing on the back, we cannot see the image on the front. Having to make this choice of showing the handwritten caption but not the image it describes was challenging but is also evocative of the fact that there will always be a side we cannot see in family photos. 

This photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier comes from her series Flint is Family. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, caused by the disposal of industrial waste in the Flint River, garnered international attention in 2018. During this time, documentary photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier recorded the impacts of this public health crisis on one family and their larger community. In this photograph, Zion, a child from Flint holds a snapshot of her mother, Shea, drinking from a fresh stream in Mississippi where she lived before moving to Michigan.  

The style of this work is reminiscent of Ferrato’s: it is also documentary photography, and it is also a photograph of someone holding a photograph. However, whereas the Ferrato piece shows us the bigger picture of current familial dynamics, of a family reflecting on the difference between their aspirational portrait and the violence of their lived experience, this photograph calls to mind intergenerational changes. This work reminds us that inheritance often includes things somewhat less tangible than physical family photographs, such as the emotional impacts of migration and the long-term effects of environmental crises. 

When Clarissa Sligh’s house-shaped book, What’s Happening with Momma?, is opened, it accordions out with one side showing the outside of the house and one side showing the inside. From the outside, we can see the backs of houses, porches, and yards.  On the inside, there are prints of Sligh’s personal family photos on each page. The fact that Sligh includes her own family photographs changes the stakes of our looking; in contrast to found photographs or documentary photographers shaping the way we understand their subjects’ family photos, Sligh willingly provides a more intimate perspective. Given access to the inside of Sligh’s home, so to speak, and seeing her own family photos offers us a more familiar look at the family who lives there, but there is yet another level to this artbook: the pieces of paper which accordion out from beneath each photo tell a different story. 

Sligh describes her experience of being a young girl playing outside of her childhood home while her mother gave birth to a sibling inside. Much too young to understand what exactly was going on, all Sligh knew was that her mother was screaming and people were rushing. She describes her uncertainty, her fear of not knowing, and how eventually, the stork delivered a baby. 

if we let ourselves be moved to look differently, these snapshots can tell us something bigger about the ways we all remember and even the ways we try to forget.

In form and content, this book replicates the experience of being on the outside – even, sometimes, of our own memories. In the context of this exhibition, what I think is so special about this book is that…it is a book. It’s easy to forget that it’s a book when it’s placed in a display case or, indeed, when we’re zooming in to view it on our computer screen. But this art object was originally created to be held in one’s hands, a much more personal and immediate mode of engagement. When it is in the case, we are forced to move around its pedestal. We are not just viewers anymore; we are forced to lean and squint, we are physically and psychologically moved to look at it differently.  

This mode of engagement epitomizes one way that we might understand family photographs like the snapshots in this exhibit. As viewers, we cannot read them the way they were originally created to be understood. We cannot know the way that the photographer saw a particular moment, or the memories associated with the experience of those pictured. They are intimate documents of someone else’s family life, but if we let ourselves be moved to look differently, these snapshots can tell us something bigger about the ways we all remember and even the ways we try to forget.