In Family Photographs, Joan Albert examines family life through the people closest to her. Made in Massachusetts from the 1970s to the early 1990s, the photographs follow her growing sons and extend to parents, friends and neighbours with their children. The subject is familiar, but familiarity is also the work’s starting point: Albert photographs relationships she inhabits, allowing humour, affection and the changing concerns of childhood to remain part of the same account.
The pictures of her sons attend to the emotions and preoccupations of boys approaching and passing through adolescence. Alongside them, Albert’s 4 × 5 view-camera portraits bring detailed observation to encounters between parents and children. These strands offer complementary ways of considering family: as an experience unfolding over time, and as a relationship made visible in a particular photographic encounter. Rather than reducing domestic life to an emblem of harmony, the work leaves room for its intensity and complexity. That makes it rewarding to consider how intimacy affects both the photographer’s access and the viewer’s understanding.
Edited by the American artist Sage Sohier, the book brings Albert’s work together in its entirety for the first time. Albert lived from 1943 to 2012, so this presentation also gives her photographs a readership beyond the period in which they were made. Tamara Shopsin’s hand-painted typography accompanies the editorial work. The 104-page volume has a hardback cover with a tip-on and silkscreen printing, giving the collection a defined physical form as well as a broader public setting.
For collectors, the book’s particular interest is the opportunity to encounter a sustained body of family photography as a whole. It allows Albert’s attention to her own sons to be considered alongside portraits of other generations and households. The significance rests in that expanded view of her work, and in the collaboration that has made it available as a book. Readers interested in domestic portraiture can approach it as a study of how closeness shapes a photographic practice.
