The Family Album

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After reading Patricia Holland's article "History, Memory and the Family Album" I really began to think about my own family albums. I had never questioned the pictures in the albums and I had never thought of who might be left out. Like every family, my family has gone through change since I was a child and the pictures I look back at now, are not an accurate portrait of what was to come. As Holland points out in her opening line of this article, "a family snapshot is an act of faith in the future" (1). When I look at a picture of me, my parents and my brothers it's as if it's a picture from a different world. A world that is gone and has now been replaced with a new world. I have no resentments for my parents getting divorced, I am just glad they are happy, but I look at these pictures and wonder what would have been. When we took this picture, we thought we would all be together forever, we had no concept of anything different. All we had was hope and we made that hope tangible by taking a picture of it and storing it in an album. Now almost 20 years later, I look at that picture and I can see the hope pouring out it, but that is all it ever will be, hope. Pictures are supposed to record reality, but all they record is what we 'want' reality to be.
All family albums have people laughing and smiling, no matter what they are doing or what they are going through at the time. Holland notes that "...for however untidy or unsatisfactory the experience, we can ensure that the picture will project the appropriate emotions into the future" (2). We always make sure we smile for the camera and then when we look back at that pictures, we sometimes ask ourselves why we are smiling. Do we even like the person who is taking a picture of us or the person that is smiling beside us? When an outsider looks at that picture, they assume that you are all friends and you are having wonderful time, when in fact, the person beside you could hate you for flirting with his wife or vice versa. We trust pictures because they capture reality, but again is this reality or is this just picture.

This past summer marked 50 years that my grandparents have been married and as a surprise, I made a slideshow of the past 50 years of their lives. I collected family albums from everyone in the family, even my grandparents, although they were not aware. It took me several days to look through the thousands of pictures, and took just as long to pick out the ones I wanted to use. As I was looking through the pictures, I came across one of their wedding day, and their was a strange man in the picture beside my grandfathers mother. I had heard a lot about my great grandmother and have seen lots of pictures of her with my grandfather and his brothers and sisters, but I have never seen this man before. I showed the picture to my father and asked him who that was, and he simply stated that, "that was grandpa's father." I could tell he did know much and what he did know he did not wish to share, so I didn't ask anymore questions, although I had so many I wanted to ask. I could tell that they did not want to talk about it, but why? Everyone in the picture was smiling, even this stranger who is my great grandfather, so why is he not in anymore family albums? I was not going to get the answer anytime soon. Maybe one day I will find out, or maybe he will be forgotten, which may be the intent of those who controlled the family albums. As Holland states, "Each new generation brings new perspectives, new understandings and new forgettings" (1). My father was taught to forget this person, and now that I have found out, I am taught to forget this person. Holland further states later in the article that "...albums contsruct their own versions of family history, in negotiation with the ideal...they will include significant moments and suitable family members and rigorously exclude others" (7). I guess this wasn't a suitable family member to include and it makes me wonder, how many people have been 'forgotten' in the family albums? I would have to do some serious research to find out, but do I want to find out? There must be good reason why they are forgotten; maybe that old stone is better left unturned.

With the modern digital capabilities of photographs and the ease of copying a picture from anywhere on the internet and placing it in your own family album, it has become a lot harder to forget. Even if you delete all of your pictures off of Facebook of you and your ex girlfriend, there could be dozens of copies out there on people's home computers. Facebook and other social networks that display pictures have made the modern family album public, as Holland notes "And yet, this most private of collections is also thoroughly public. Its meanings are social as well as personal" (3). The family album is no longer secluded in a dusty cabinet 3 hours away in your grandparents living room and it is no longer one of kind. Now, it is on the internet for all to see and anyone can have a copy for their own consumption.
The modern ability to easily take, store and copy pictures has taken away from meaning and prestige of the picture itself. One picture doesn't mean much anymore, rather it is the group of 50 pictures that might mean something. Now, instead of having one picture to describe a 4 hour event, you have dozens of pictures that were taken each hour of the event. I can only hope that my great grandchildren can file through the thousands of pictures of me and gain a fair understanding of who I was.