Exploring Family History and Storytelling through Photographs: A Case Study, Exercises of Photography

Download Exploring Family History and Storytelling through Photographs: A Case Study and more Exercises Photography in PDF only on Docsity! 46 Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’: Providing Tellabilty to the Storied through a Family’s Photographs key words:Photo-elicitation, tellability, ventriloquism of the folk, family photographs, family stories sALLY BUsBY PHoto-essAY ABSTRACT We store boxes and albums of family photographs including those handed down from generations, whether good or bad. This paper considers the narrative of the plethora of photographs made by my family over the years. I spent three years printing enlargements of my family’s photographic negatives from the 1930s through the 1960s. Multiple generations of my family wrote stories on the printed photographs. Of significance is how my family’s writing synthesised the importance of the photographed moment as well as hinting to connections among all of the images and stories. I argue that without the photo elicitation to create a path for tellability by the ‘folk’ many family storying would be ventriloquism (the telling of stories) that would not provide the respect for generations to share through combining image and text to their own story. The family tradition of sharing stories and looking at photographs together is a common process since the nineteenth century. In my early years I once ‘wasted’ an entire roll of film taking photographs of cars and squirrels. I was seven and visiting my grandmother in New Orleans, Louisiana. My thought at that time was that the world would change, and it might be nice to know what cars looked like during the early 1980s. I did not recognise it at the time, but this was the genesis of my fascination with photographs, snapshots, and the story behind them. I also share my experience as an undergraduate at university. I was excited about learning with my focus on finishing projects and earning grades, not necessarily using the following narrative project as research. Whilst working on this project I discovered broad connections among family, word, image and the greater community. The following analysis of building the narrative argues that the text added by my family to the visual images is significant because their voice drives the connections through stories. My family, the ‘folk’ of my project, decided what to share, what was significant, and what to silence. It is only in examining this inquiry decades later through the lenses of time and analysis of theory that I understand the process continues to follow Jasmine Ulmer’s idea of ‘Slow Ontology’ where awareness and observation ‘promotes alternative rhythms of inquiry through writing’ (Ulmer 2017: 201). Background I chose photography as an elective during my sophomore year where I learned to use a bottle opener to pry open spools of film in the dark, muscle memory to blindly re-spool onto developing reels, and broom handles to mix ‘chemistry’. I spent hours in the red-lit darkroom watching silver pieces clump on paper. I fell in love with the process of developing and printing — mirroring my enchantment with the art of taking and viewing the photograph. I took more semesters of photography as an undergraduate, not just because I remained mesmerised by the process, but because I discovered a cigar box that helped me unlock stories and connections among three generations of my mother’s family. I found the cigar box in a tall dresser of my grandparents’ home during a weekend visit. There were several other cigar boxes in back corners of dresser drawers, but this box did not gape open with thick piles of scallop-edged, high-contrast snapshots from my grandmother’s and mother’s childhoods. It instead was shut tight with a purple metallic string stretched twice around the box’s middle, its hinge not sprung from years of strain because instead of prints, it held negatives; many of them looked clouded and obscure. They were stacked tightly in small piles inside waxy glassine envelopes. Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 47 Unlike the 35-millimeter negatives I saw almost daily in class and lab, wound around metal spools and hung to dry after developing, these negatives were large, some the size of the index cards. Others were square, neatly centering shadows of dresses and edges of houses. I could not tell much from the negatives other than that they were old, and I could only wonder how they would look as prints. My grandmother agreed to let me take the cigar box of negatives after I explained, ‘You will get all of the negatives back — just as they are. I know what I am doing. I am taking photography’. I knew I was lying to her. I had no clue what I was doing. Methods attempting to add truth to my promise Following my professor’s instructions, I transferred the two hundred or so negatives to clear plastic sleeves and stored them in a binder. The cigar box sat on the corner of my desk, the purple string wound in a tight circle and stored with the empty glassine envelopes inside the box. That next morning I went to the photography lab to print contact sheets of the gathered sheets of negatives. The first time I walked outside of the darkroom to look at one of my contact sheets in the light, I just stared down at those small pictures. I saw my mom as a baby and my grandfather and grandmother. I saw a lot of people I did not know, but I recognised well-composed images consisting of the geometric shapes of grouped family, lines of earth adjacent to the lines of a building and body, and a tight frame of a face with a blurred background of trees. I was in love with the compositions, intrigued by the characters, and knew that these images told a story — one that I didn’t quite understand. I enlarged particularly captivating negatives, ones that were interesting from both an artistic and cultural standpoint (Zuromskis 2008). After printing a series of twenty pictures, I took another trip to my grandparents’ home. This time I did not go searching for pictures but brought them with me. I explained that we would look at the photographs they had made decades earlier and I printed days before, talk about the photographs, and write on them. I remember the questioning looks I received from my family, ‘Write on photographs? The fronts of them?’ Honestly, I felt those same questions and doubts about my decision to incorporate my family’s voices through their own words, but I only suggested we might do a sample photograph together. We briefly discussed the image, who was in it, who had made the photograph, where it was made, and wondered about why it might have been made. I then wrote what I knew about the photograph right below it with a thin Sharpie, explained what I had written and why, and then asked my mother, grandmother, and grandfather to add some words of their own below what I had written (see figure 1). It was when I read my grandfather’s writing on the picture that I realised there was more to these pictures than well-centered images or compelling compositions. I knew very little of what my grandfather had just explained so succinctly in his text, using an openness I did not recognise. ‘This is one of my best friends’, he wrote. ‘We went everywhere together. We are still best of friends. We have never lived more than one mile apart. He is two years older’. It was so different from the information offered by my grandmother, mother, and myself — all of us so enthralled with the process of taking the photograph and looking at it — that we had forgotten the process of looking into it. My grandfather had a gift for looking into the photograph to see what it meant, seeing not just the people or the dates or the places, but allowing these facts to become catalysts for deeper memory and understanding. Throughout my childhood, my family had often spent hours looking at and talking about our pictures, but we had never written the stories down. My grandfather took these hours of stories about pictures and people in them and put them on paper. He showed what I had not imagined could come across — the folk event of viewing photographs. My grandfather’s writing gave the depth of oral history to a photograph already rich with the beauty of a thoughtfully created image. Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’ 50 Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 within a family group. Individuals share their thoughts, life histories, and connections to others through a ‘rhimositic story’ in which there are multiple points of entrance into one’s story. These roots and branches of stories create pieces of a larger narrative. There is no expectation for a beginning, middle, and end in a ‘rhimositic story’ and self-reflection moves in and out of time periods of an individual’s life where the stories ‘form an ongoing process of co-construction and co-reconstruction’ (Sermijn, Devlieger, and Loots 2008: 644). This is self-storying. The freedom of expression emerges from the combination of images and words created by my family years ago. Using this art and story, I discover more than who the subjects were on the day the facts of their lives were preserved on film. The reflections develop my family’s past and their dreams, those actuated (see figure 8) as well as those deferred (Hughes 1951). Side-by- side, writing and photographs present an unbroken whole of three generations of storytellers practicing autonomy in sharing stories using their own voices. References: Hirsch M. 1997 Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Post-Memory, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Hughes L. 1951 Montage of a Dream Deferred, Holt, New York. Kuhn A. 2007 ‘Photography and cultural memory: a methodological exploration’, Visual Studies, 22, 3: 283-292. Labov W. and Waletzky, J. 1967 ‘Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience’, in J. Holm, (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 12–44 Langellier K. M. and Peterson, E. E. 2004. Storytelling in daily life: Performing narrative, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Livingston D. and Dyer, P. 2010 ‘A view from the window: photography, recording family memories’, Social Alternatives, 29, 3: 20-28. Ritchie S. 1993 ‘Ventriloquist folklore: Who speaks for representation?’, Western Folklore, 52, 2: 365-378. Sermijn J., Devlieger, P. and Loots, G. 2008 ‘The Narrative Construction of the Self-selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story’, Qualitative Inquiry, 23, 3: 201-211. Ulmer J. B. 2017 ‘Writing Slow Ontology’, Qualitative Inquiry, 23, 3: 201-211. Zuromskis, C. 2008 ‘Ordinary Pictures and Accidental Masterpieces: Snapshot photography in the modern art museum’, Art Journal, 67, 2: 104-125. Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’ Biography Author : Photographer Sally Busby is a doctoral student in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University Bloomington. Her previous studies were in fieldwork and anthropology focusing on the Southern region of American Studies. Her current interests include ‘ownvoices in literature and research’ and the ‘trajectories and results of life-long learning’. Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 51 Figure 1 Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’ 52 Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’ Figure 2 Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 55 Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’ Figure 5 56 Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’ Figure 6 Social Alternatives Vol. 40 No. 2, 2021 57 Reprints, Review, and Refusing Ventriltoquism of the ‘Folk’ Figure 7