Page 139 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 133

‘…it is not an image that many of us could find in our family album.’
Source Elin O’Hara Slavick, detail of one of the dresses from A Wall of Incoherent
Dresses, 1991. Collection of the artist.

read other stories between the lines; there are solid similarities between family
pictures (the pose, the occasion, the smiles, sometimes the clothes), a general
27
covering over that ‘perpetuate[s] dominant familial myths and ideologies.’ It is
in this way that all family pictures are masked: they assume the mask of the
familial. ‘Photography,’ writes Barthes, ‘cannot signify (aim at a generality)
except by assuming a mask.’ 28
Yet in a play of contradiction, childhood photographs often seem like an
extraordinary touch with the real: as evidence of the unmasked self. Looking
through my father’s family album, I see all the essential traces of him: his quiet
way, his tight-lipped smile, something moral and self-assured, his surprising love
for wearing silly hats that stands in direct contrast to his hatred for costume, the
pure pleasure he feels in being with the right people, his always very thick hair, a
comfortableness with his own body, his love for dogs, his devotion to his
mother. Some will say that I am reading what I want to see into these
photographs, but I say, ‘Nevertheless, I see it.’’ I know that you can see it too (a
little bit of truth) even in pictures of people you and I only know through
pictures.
I have found such kernels of truth lodged in the baby and childhood
photographs of artists and cultural critics that are reproduced in the centre pages
of Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures—the fourth volume