Family Affairs (1999)
Family Affairs was an installation that comprised 3 distinct parts:
Dear Mom: 3 generations of mother and daughter portraits (sent to me by my mother) and a correspondence about them between us (which many years later is included and expanded upon in my 2018 publication Everyone is Present).
Family Affairs: a series of 16 photographs I shot of my own children
Shooting Back: a group of photographs they shot of me.
Together, they become a conversation about family affairs, love affairs, maternal ambivalence, and photography’s capacity to both record and invent the world.
-
There's a wonderful text that Photographer Richard Avedon wrote in the late 1980's, called Borrowed Dogs where he talks about his own family photograph albums. He says that his family took great care with their snapshots. They planned compositions. They dressed up. They posed in front of expensive cars, and homes that weren't theirs. They borrowed dogs. He recounts how in one year of family photographs he counted eleven different dogs. His family never in fact owned a dog. He talks about the fact that in his family albums “all the photographs revealed a lie about who the Avedons really were, but a truth about who they really wanted to be.” This lie/truth paradox has always interested me when it comes to domestic snaps.
Family Affairs, installation view
Family Affairs, installation view
Shooting Back, photo: Jessie Lewis
Shooting Back & Dear Mom, installation view
Tusia and Leonia Kallir, Poland, 1935
Leonia and Terry Kurgan, South Africa 1958
Terry Kurgan and Jessie Lewis, South Africa 1994