Does family album needs to be adequate to stereotypes?

[Ko.Fe.]

Sure, we like kid staring into the lens (with face - "only because you have asked me") we have just purchased. But it is not family pictures (IMO).
Nor they have to be over-cheese.

Join me if you can.

 

[Rayt]

I think these type of natural photos are superior than look-at-me photos because they are just more interesting. If I took a photo of my kid staring into the camera that photos should only be interesting to my family and no one else and I would not punish total strangers with them.

 

[robert blu]

I like the idea to have in the family collection moments of daily life...

spontaneous not prepared snaps will be appreciated in future 🙂

 

[Archiver]

As much as my Dad liked photography, his family always insisted on those godawful posed smiling group pictures. Year after year of 'everyone gather together for a photo', then someone fumbling with a camera for F knows how long until the shutter goes off. So dumb. And he wondered why we didn't like having our photos taken?? And the irony is that he taught me the basics of photography with his Pentax ME, which I now have and cherish, and take photos like he never has.

Years later, I mentioned his family's vile practice of posed family pictures, and he said that 'that was the old style, you do things differently now'. Uhhh that was a really old style for when photography was really expensive. All those awful posed family photos were taken in the 80s and 90s. And his explanation was just an excuse which ignored the rich history of candid photography from years past.

A second irony is that I take family photos like no other family member does, in a candid artistic documentary style, and while everyone loves them, no one can do the same. Everyone, even my generation and younger, defaults to horrible posed photos.

Maybe the best examples of 'candid' family photos I've seen are in the carousel scene in the TV show Madmen. I first saw it when someone posted it here on RFF, and it totally captures what I think family photography should be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus

 

[Out to Lunch]

Today, the 'spontaneous' family picture is stereotype and usually as boring as the posed variety.

 

[Godfrey]

I photograph my family and friends in a bazillion different ways.

This set is from my recent "snap a photo of all the people I have lunch with" notion. They're mostly head shots, sometimes a small group, and often a lot of fun:

Polaroid SLR670m by MiNT
Polaroid Originals SX-70 B&W film

Click on photo to see the whole set.​

G

 

[Richard G]

There's all types. I have one of me an my wife with my camera taken by my sister in law. I love to see that photo. I took one posed of my wife and two children and my wife's sister. I adore that photo and seeing my wife so young and full of energy always brings a tear to my eye. I think it is a very good photo. Sorry I can't post it here.

But yes, I do love the informal shots, like my daughter laughing, backlit, outside the ice-cream place, or my son painting his model soldiers, or one of them sipping a cup of tea at the table, opposite the cat, also seated, patiently waiting for nothing much.

 

[peterm1]

Family albums SHOULD be a repository for all the shots that usually do not make it onto social media - the ones that break the stereotypes.

Including the silly ones:

(I hurt my finger...........)

The Really Silly ones:

And the Embarrassing ones:

(God when I was a baby was it really the fashion to dress little boys up in unisex smocks to have formal pictures taken - surely that was something out of my great grandparents generation? REALLY? I guess I was just afflicted with parents who were very traditional -they were from a country family after all. (And BTW was I really that chubby?)

PS it really must have affected me - no, before you even suggest it, I do not like dressing in womens clothes - but I still recall the smock (mid blue color), the fake grass which prickled my bum and the strange man with the big contraption on stilts. I think it was called a camera...... I even recall the location of his studio, it was all that impressive and unusual. On reflection, and luckily I may have got my love of photography from this very moment,and no, I repeat, not a love of cross dressing (though, as Seinfeld might have said, ".......not that there's anything wrong with it"). 🙂 🙂

And even the ones where the family member is looking totally P'd off. Boy will I take grief if she finds I have let this one be revealed.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

 

[Archiver]

Today, the 'spontaneous' family picture is stereotype and usually as boring as the posed variety.

I thought selfies were the contemporary stereotypical family pictures. 😛

 

[charjohncarter]

Not family, but a staged shot:

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Promo by John Carter, on Flickr

 

[Archiver]

There's all types. I have one of me an my wife with my camera taken by my sister in law. I love to see that photo. I took one posed of my wife and two children and my wife's sister. I adore that photo and seeing my wife so young and full of energy always brings a tear to my eye. I think it is a very good photo. Sorry I can't post it here.

But yes, I do love the informal shots, like my daughter laughing, backlit, outside the ice-cream place, or my son painting his model soldiers, or one of them sipping a cup of tea at the table, opposite the cat, also seated, patiently waiting for nothing much.

Occasionally, someone will ask me to take a group photo of people present at a dinner or other gathering, and I oblige. It's an easy way to get everyone in the same picture and record who was there. I'm not against posed images per se, but the stilted, artificial and repetitive posed family pictures that we were subjected to as kids.

In the mid 90s, I was in Hong Kong and passing through a shopping centre. New World Centre, if memory serves me correctly. A woman was getting a young girl to stand beside a column in the shopping centre so she could take a picture - the girl had a sullen, annoyed look on her face, one that I knew all too well. Behind her was nothing of photographic note, and the column was featureless. Why take a photo of the girl beside a featureless column and nothing interesting in the background? Why not take something more visually meaningful?

I'm pretty sure it was in this section of the now demolished New World Centre (not my image).

New World Centre, Kowloon, Hong Kong by Hanne Therkildsen, on Flickr

 

[shimokita]

Emiko on the floor, working on some sewing at age 91 (July 2017)

 

[maigo]

Does family album needs to be adequate to stereotypes?

I have several types of family photos taken of my kids (10, 5 year old).

A) Candids in the house, neighbourhood and at usual kid places (school, playground, library, parks).
B) Repeat semi-relaxed posed pictures taken at the same place, several times a year with one kid or both since birth. There are several of these locations around the neighborhood and at my work.
C) Semi-relaxed posed photos taken while traveling at major landmarks (Eiffel Tower, GG Bridge, etc.). I WAS THERE style photos.
D) Relaxed, candied photos taken in the same type of place while traveling - these are all taken through or in front of a window - while on a train, car, bus, plane, ferry, etc.
E) A series of photos taken of my daughter in relaxed poses of her choice with discarded tube style TVs. People once abandoned them throughout our neighbourhood. Now there are few and far between. I now have 50 plus photos, one for each TV, taken over past 8.5 years.
F) Candid photos of kids engaged in seasonal activities that we enjoy as a family every year. Winter snow sports, Chinese New Year, spring cherry blossom, summer strawberry picking and birthdays spent at the beach, fall apple picking and autumn colours, watching salmon runs, pumpkin patches, Halloween, Christmas.
G) Posed family group photos twice a year at cherry blossoms and at autumn leaves.
H) Mirror shots - our family posing in front of a mirror - wherever and whenever we find one. There are dozens of this type.

Add everything up and there are thousands of album-ready photos from past ten years. Twenty years if you count the photos of my wife in The Time Before Kids.

All photos sit in my LR catalogue, thankfully already keyworded, flagged as picks and in collections. Yes -backed up, in two locations.

Ideally I would have photo books and online private albums produced for family each year however none are posted or printed.

I do not share family pictures in social media and no one but my wife and kids have seen these photos.

I can not stop taking photos, but you knew that already. That is why we are gathered here in the church basement every Monday night to discuss our addiction. Our shared problem and the path forward.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Archiver]

Add everything up and there are thousands of album-ready photos from past ten years. Twenty years if you count the photos of my wife in The Time Before Kids.

All photos sit in my LR catalogue, thankfully already keyworded, flagged as picks and in collections. Yes -backed up, in two locations.

Ideally I would have photo books and online private albums produced for family each year however none are posted or printed.

I do not share family pictures in social media and no one but my wife and kids have seen these photos.

I can not stop taking photos, but you knew that already. That is why we are gathered here in the church basement every Monday night to discuss our addiction. Our shared problem and the path forward.

Your list of images sounds absolutely wonderful, and the variety would make for some fantastic family photo books.

My friend's sister's family makes annual photobooks of their trips. TBH their photos aren't particularly good, but they are personally important to them, so that's fine. Way too many 'let's put the kids in front of/beside some sign' for my liking, but that's their taste. They have their photobooks in a stack on the shelf, so they can pick them up and look at them at any time.

Bear in mind that if you do make photobooks or online albums for other family members to own or view, that unless you or your kids are very loved in the family, the viewers won't have as much of an attachment to those pictures as you.

Having said that, creating hard copies of your best collections is a great way to make them permanent. I have yet to print any significant number of images, despite having shot hundreds of thousands of digital photos over the past 17 years. I really ought to take my own advice and make some annual photo books. My film photos always get prints and scans, but I hardly shoot film these days, and most of my film photos are more landscapes and streetscapes than family/friends.

Eventually, I'd like to create my own photobooks in the style of proper photography exhibition catalogues, with one image per page, or one image over two pages. I'll have to look into this.

 

[Archiver]

Photographer Kevin Mullins created this fantastic YouTube video of his son's birthday, using images taken with his Fuji X100F. No stilted posed nonsense, just pure life and activity.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHZrvd0NeqE

 

[Out to Lunch]

From a time when family photos were taken in a studio by a professional photographer. This one from the early 1930's:

 

[xavyr]

haka.

Haka. by w m, on Flickr

 

[css9450]

From a time when family photos were taken in a studio by a professional photographer. This one from the early 1930's:

And it was probably taken at some inconvenient shutter speed like 1/2 second.... Itself an improvement from the olden days of several seconds, even in daylight! Just slightly faster than having your portrait painted with a paintbrush!

The slow shutter speeds of those days probably did a lot to further the tradition of the stiffly posed, somber group photos.

 

[Out to Lunch]

Agreed...frozen in time. This said, I am now living in South East Asia and even today, formal family portraits look exactly the same. Because group photos like this are meant to confirm family cohesion. No smiles for eternity.