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May 6, 2023 9:30 AM   Subscribe

Documentary Family Photography is a recent movement in family photography that eschews the posed portrait in favor of capturing moments of real life in passing. As images we make of ourselves become more and more polished, people are wanting to recreate some of the "spontaneous and unexpected" moments of the analog-camera era in photo sessions where "shit gets real" and "perfect is boring." The Documentary Family Photographers association has educational resources and a directory; the Family Photojournalistic Association does similarly; the Documentary Family Awards gives prizes.
posted by Miko (30 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I like the sentiment but doesn't the mere act of taking the photo immediately take the photographer (not the subject) out of the moment ?

The act of taking the picture turns the photographer - literally - into a viewer, not a participant.
posted by Faintdreams at 9:35 AM on May 6, 2023


As images we make of ourselves become more and more polished, people are wanting to recreate some of the "spontaneous and unexpected" moments of the analog-camera era in photo sessions where "shit gets real" and "perfect is boring."

William Gibson must be so very tired of having invented the future in such detail.
posted by praemunire at 9:40 AM on May 6, 2023 [19 favorites]


The act of taking the picture turns the photographer - literally - into a viewer, not a participant.

Isn't that the dilemma at the heart of all documentary work, reportage, etc? Not unique to family photos.
posted by Miko at 9:43 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


Spontaneous photos preferred, but try convincing a photo-stager they are wasting everyone's time.
posted by Brian B. at 9:47 AM on May 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


William Gibson must be so very tired of having invented the future in such detail.

I know his twitter handle TheGreatDismal is a reference to a swamp, but I always took it to be a reference to his unfortunately accurate extrapolations
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:16 AM on May 6, 2023


I wish I had read this 26 years ago. Now my kids have moved out.
posted by mecran01 at 10:26 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Hold the phone - people are deliberately paying professional photographers to come and do candid photos of themselves?

Dear hipsters - all you need to do is, you know those photos you usually delete from your phone? Don't delete them. Thank you, that'll be five dollars.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:29 AM on May 6, 2023 [25 favorites]


In the days of analog photography, you could not see the result of your shots before developing them, which allowed for a lot more spontaneity.

Hm, I dunno. Having a camera in our pockets at all times seems like it enables spontaneous photography in its own way. Each shot is also much cheaper.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:32 AM on May 6, 2023 [9 favorites]


Faintdreams: The act of taking the picture turns the photographer - literally - into a viewer, not a participant.

That sounds benignly passive. The photographer brings all their baggage and a lot of assumptions to the feast; far from not being a participant they are the director: even in candid, unposed, pics the taker is gate-keeper. Now there may be Family Photographers who are deeply insightful empathic gold; but the remaining 95% are making a living by filtering families through their own lens.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:51 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


Analog spontaneous? You had x amount of film frames and couldn't afford to waste them. You posed the fuck out of things. Even if money was no object, most people only carried so many rolls at a time. Even the pro guys with the vests.

Not to mention most people couldn't get things airbrushed and didn't have access to scanning/Photoshop. Red eyes and closed eyes were just things you had to accept. Or blurriness or weird lighting.
posted by emjaybee at 11:34 AM on May 6, 2023 [6 favorites]


That doesn’t seem true based on my family photo archives, which are full of awkward candid shots, messy dinner tables, weird facial expressions and “didn’t know how dumb this looked” outfits.
posted by Miko at 12:39 PM on May 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


There are some great candid shots of our wedding from a family member who mostly photographs birds and insects. (Who volunteered, or was gracious about being volunteered.)
posted by clew at 12:39 PM on May 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


I too hate the posed shots. We always take them, but they rarely make the cut of "keepers" for me. As a photographer who primarily takes photos of my own family, I've wrestled with the idea that taking pictures pulls me out of moments. I've come around to recognizing that taking photos is a particular way of participating in moments. When I've got my camera out, I am paying attention in a very particular way. It's focused, grounded in empathy, and very gratifying. To be sure, often moments with family require me to pay attention in different ways -- my kids want me to play with them on a playground, not just take pictures, for example. So I've found ways to switch modes quickly, and to know when a certain kind of attention is needed and when there is space for me to go into photographer mode. Now my kids have cameras too, and sometimes we go into photographer mode together. It's wonderful. And the yearly calendar of photos from the previous year is in high demand from the grandparents and aunties.
posted by cubby at 12:42 PM on May 6, 2023 [5 favorites]


Posed shots are fine, children rarely sit around talking to great-grandma (at least in my familly), but they should be used to mark occasions, not be the purpose of having a camera at all. My family was very much a "stop whatever you're doing and look at the camera" family, and we Gen X kids recognized it as annoying pretty early, but as above, try telling a staged photographer that. I do think it's good to document occasions and not everybody is going to be in candid photos and maybe all-candid isn't the best storytelling tool if you have to shuffle among 20 pictures to find Uncle Bob who is only ever in the background. You have a picture that has Uncle Bob with everybody else and you can tell your Uncle Bob story. Maybe group pictures can be called "legend" (as in charts or maps) photos.

At the same time, the 70s weren't that far from the time when posing was required by the technology, where a photograph required being perfectly still for some period of time. I have all of our home movies digitized, and there is one scene from the early 60s where my dad is in front of a house filming everybody going to Easter services or something. My great grandma, born some years before 1900, comes out of the house, sees my dad with a camera, and stops and straightens herself up and just stands there waiting for a picture to be taken. The movies are soundless, but you can see her go kind of "oh, ok" about just keeping walking.

So, it's taken several generations to outgrow posed shots, and that's fine as long as it keeps happening. Think about the alternatives!
posted by rhizome at 1:20 PM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


All of my pictures are candid, as thanks to my Anglo-Saxon heritage along with my hatred of direct sunlight and sweating, I am blindingly pale.

First recorded in 1620–30; (from French candide) from Latin candidus “shining white,” equivalent to cand(ēre) “to be shining white”
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:38 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


I feel like whoever thinks you were getting more "spontaneous and unexpected" moments in the days of film photography wasn't alive for them, or was very wealthy. My childhood photos are all staged because my parents didn't want to waste film on a shot where it was going to turn out everyone was making a weird face. By contrast, I have tons of candid shots of my kids because anytime something nice or funny is happening I get my phone out and snap a picture.

Probably the photos I show people most are a four-image series of my then-toddler the first time she ate kimchi. The dawning "wait, I HATE this" realization on her face, captured in real time, is the funniest set of pics I've ever taken. But hell if I'd have used film for it!
posted by potrzebie at 1:58 PM on May 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


Documentary Family Photography is a recent movement in family photography

Sorry what? Based on these links, I'm not sure how this is a recent thing but I accept I may be missing something. Candid or spontaneous shots of everyday familial activity, especially if the photographer is a participant, are called snapshots. This kind of photography has been a thing since the dawn of consumer level photography and to call it "recent" is bizarre. I have 100s of images like that. A staged shot, whether posed in a seated position in front of a backdrop or the participants doing some kind of random "familial" activity, is called a portrait. Portraits have existed as long as photography.
posted by Ashwagandha at 2:35 PM on May 6, 2023 [9 favorites]


I think the thing that's "recent" is that professional photographers are trying to get in on it?
posted by potrzebie at 2:53 PM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]


I’ve been curious about the costs of film and processing for previous generations.

During covid lockdown I scanned hundreds of negatives my great-great-grandfather took in the 1910s-1930s. I’m eternally grateful to him, not just for saving these giant 116-format negatives, but because in addition to the typical staged photos he documented how the family farm worked.

He took photos of the kids picking fruit in the orchard, cultivating vegetables in the garden, collecting berries in the forest, making jars of preserves and homemade wine with their mother, and tending to the cattle and sheep. He handed off the camera to somebody else — possibly my great-great-grandmother — to get shots of himself in the fields plowing, planting, harvesting, and baling with the neighbors (they apparently shared some large machinery). They documented the process of butchering a hog in late autumn and tapping maple trees for syrup in early spring.

And there are so many, many pictures of animals — some of the livestock, but many more of their dogs and cats just hanging out looking cute.

This was a farm family of recent immigrants from Bohemia to Minnesota. They did all right as farmers but were by no means wealthy. Yet clearly they were fine with spending money to take dozens of photos of their cats laying around in the garden and the kids trying to dress up lambs in their own clothes.
posted by theory at 2:56 PM on May 6, 2023 [16 favorites]


I honestly wish I had this for the first couple of weeks I was home with my kid. I tried on my own to take pictures (or request that my husband take them) that captures the full emotional range of that time, but I didn’t have the skill to do that. I think a professional photographer (some of them?) knows how to capture emotion or a story in a way that the rest of us don’t. I also see value in this because we have so few pictures of all of us. We also have less pictures of me and my kid than of my partner and kid.
posted by CMcG at 3:26 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


I flat out don't understand the analog bit but I suspect it is more about language and how there is a tendency to valorize and nostalgify technologies from earlier era's. The photography seems to be essentially going for a photojournalist style which isn't really about empirical reality but about telling a story. Looking at the images I feel simultaneously that they are nice and creepy. Nice because the seem to capture life, creepy because their....symbology?? (my vocabulary shrinks day to day) so strongly suggests journalism and the transmutation of intimate life into the foodstuff of media consumption.
posted by Pembquist at 3:45 PM on May 6, 2023 [4 favorites]


I think what they're harking back to is actually quite a recent chapter in the history of photography--of the disposable camera and the photobooth at the State Fair. I have a lot of 90s snapshots that would fit the description, and I was damn near impoverished for most of the 90s. But just one decade earlier and formal posed school pictures with wicker chairs in the background were a Big Thing.
posted by praemunire at 4:38 PM on May 6, 2023


I’ve been curious about the costs of film and processing for previous generations.

It is a good question and pretty interesting. I don't have access to the books on hand but this site talks a bit about early film costs (often developing costs were rolled into the price of film) and helpfully has this chart.

Analog spontaneous?

It could be as there were cameras that were geared to that - particularly half frame cameras which essentially doubled your exposures by shrinking them (there's a previously about them) and some other smaller formats (like 110) were marketed as "fun" cameras. The Lomography crowd love their janky plastic cameras for similar vibes.
posted by Ashwagandha at 6:46 PM on May 6, 2023


JLYFL!

Excuse my French.... just live your fucking life instead of trying to pose for it!
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 7:52 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Neat. Nice post. I definitely prefer candid to posed.
I'll also once again mentioned the Internet K-Hole for posed/candid film-era pics.
posted by phigmov at 1:22 AM on May 7, 2023


Candid or spontaneous shots of everyday familial activity, especially if the photographer is a participant, are called snapshots. This kind of photography has been a thing since the dawn of consumer level photography and to call it "recent" is bizarre.

The distinction (assuming the photographer is any good) is in things like composition, depth of focus, etc. I can take snapshots all day long on my phone, but it's blind luck if one of them ends up being composed well and "tells a story," say.

When I was a small child, a relative was working as a professional photographer, so lots of the family photos of that era are of startling good quality and many overlap with the genre these people are advertising. (Also, every so often I'd end up in a photo in a magazine, usually in the background or when a generic cute kid was needed as a prop.)

I don't think I'd ever pay to have pictures taken*, but if I did this style seems much more my thing than the rigid poses that you more typically see. (* The exception is that if I needed to start online dating now, I'd pay for some decent photos that look better than a selfie but don't look like a professional headshot.)
posted by Dip Flash at 6:42 AM on May 7, 2023


“In the days of analog photography, you could not see the result of your shots before developing them, which allowed for a lot more spontaneity.”
Many, many pros took Polaroids before snapping the shutter of the big camera.
posted by Ideefixe at 12:03 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]


As someone that hires photographers specifically for this look, it may not be posed but it is absolutely directed.

"Run towards me"
"Kiss, but with your teeth"
Etc.

The results are great, but they're not really candid. You usually get a 60-90 minute session and you want to maximize it.
posted by coldbabyshrimp at 7:34 PM on May 7, 2023


Hope this is not in the self-link territory:
I have a good friend who is a really good family photographer in this exact style. We have had a couple of sessions with her, and it was very relaxing -- she would tell us to walk across a street, say, while she snapped away in front of us, or we'd be told to twirl a bit with our kid. The shots that she took for us reflect how we interact as a family, and I think that's what makes those photos special, and more 'true' than classic posed shots.
posted by of strange foe at 7:51 PM on May 7, 2023


I am the designated repository for my large extended families archives.
The men were all avid amateur photographers, going all the way back to the 1920s.

The hardest part of my job is throwing stuff out. It's amazing how much film was devoted to photographing geographic locations. It seems bizarre, today, that we would go to all the trouble of carefully taking a photograph of Big Ben. Back in the day you couldn't pull out your phone and google it. I suppose it was "proof" that they'd seen the thing in the flesh.

I estimate about 3/4s of their photos have no people in them at all - which is rough and sad. I wanna see great gramma when she was a flighty young lady.

Some of the "place" photographs *are* important, though. Especially those taken in rural areas, during war-time, etc. I suspect some of these places might no longer exist. I'm hanging on to them - perhaps to scan and upload into google maps.

This is a lovely post, "verb" photographs are almost always more compelling than "noun" photographs.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:08 AM on May 8, 2023


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