Album Familia - Project Statement

The ‘Family Album’ will be familiar to most people as a collection, an archive of images, put together, usually by parents, for the benefit of the family as a whole. It serves to strengthen the bonds between family members, reinforcing the idea of the family unit by promoting a sense of belonging and recognition. While families themselves may vary in their make-up, the family album provides a constant in that they are often compiled to reflect our desires and expectations: high-days, holidays, celebrations, achievements and acquisitions feature in almost every family’s album, eliminating the mundane. 

Often, the family photographer is also responsible for the final edit, determining which prints make the hallowed leaves of the album and which should languish in a shoebox under the bed. The archive exists in two formats; one treasured and sometimes shared with friends and family, and one which generally remains unexamined. Formally posed graduation photographs, birthday parties, foreign holidays, new cars, first days at school - these images are given pride of place. But like the painting in Dorian Gray’s attic, there is also often a box containing those shots we don’t wish to reveal; where heads are cut in half, someone refused to smile, the flash didn’t work or the mess in your kitchen is too obvious. These ‘duds’ are rarely thrown out. They are still precious because they still have something of ourselves in them, they’re just not for public consumption. The Family Album is reserved for those images which preserve our sense of pride and promulgate our own idealised sense of who we are.

What happens then when you’re no longer sure who you are? What should you share when your family struggles under the weight of multiple physical and mental health concerns? How do you record pleasures and successes while enduring years of unemployment? What is left to celebrate when circumstances dictate that you walk away from everything you ever worked for, and from everything that you believed represented who you are? What does your family album look like then? 

When I was very small it was explained to me that I had been adopted. I was too young to fully understand the ramifications of this announcement so I accepted it without too many questions. In recent years I have come to understand how being adopted has left its mark. Having a family of my own became of paramount importance to me. I do not wish to take away anything from my adoptive family, but our relationship was necessarily framed by overt differences and I longed for a sense of connection and recognition that simply did not, and could not exist. Growing up, the family album which in so many other families serves to highlight familiar genetic traits, only reminded me that I did not quite fit in.

There was also a desire for a home of my own. We moved house frequently while I was growing up, and I was conscious that I only ever had time to make quite superficial relationships, and never felt as if I belonged anywhere at all. What I wanted was a home, and a family to fill it with; an opportunity to make connections on a deeper level than had ever previously been possible, to have roots.

To an outsider, it would seem that this craving for family and stability had been satisfied. I married my husband in 1995 and over the next few years we added three children, several pets and what we believed would be our ‘forever home’ to our lives. Superficially, we must have appeared to be floating along in an idyllic state of domestic bliss. But of course, life, and families, are not really like that and so, along with every other family, we had our challenges to face. Sometimes it has seemed we had more than our fair share, if such a thing were to exist.

Early on, we knew that something was different about our son. Behaviours that we found cute and clever at home couldn’t quite so easily be brushed off as idiosyncratic once he entered the official school system. By the age of six he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, adding to his existing diagnosis of asthma. It sounds quite simple when you write it down like that, glib even; but it wasn’t. Anyone with a child on the autistic spectrum will recognise the worry, frustration, sleeplessness and helplessness that accompanies such a diagnosis. They will know what it is to come under the scrutiny of other parents with non-autistic children, whose stares run through a spectrum varying from pity at one end, to disgust or outrage at the other, with condescension somewhere in the middle. In addition to this, I have had to learn to live with the symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and ongoing depressive episodes. Our middle child developed Scoliosis (a curvature of the spine) which wasn’t noticed until she had already stopped growing. It was too late for corrective surgery and so she continues to live with constant pain. We took our youngest daughter from specialist to specialist trying to work out why a bright child with 20/20 vision could not see to read. She has a processing issue which results in visual crowding, making reading far more of a challenge than for other children, and thus making it difficult for her to keep up with her peers at school. This list, skims over the worry, exhaustion, frustration, confusion, embarrassment, tension and pain that we all live with on a daily basis, but perhaps that goes some way towards illustrating how all these strains were just our version of normal. We didn’t know anything else and so in spite of the difficulties, we simply got on with things. To compound matters, my husband lost his job and for nearly four years we lived in a constant state of uncertainty. We hung on nervously, hoping that our situation would change and improve. Things did eventually change, but not for the better. 

In August 2016, the five of us swapped what had been our family home on the edge of a village - the physical manifestation of the roots I had so sorely desired - for a two bedroomed flat above a Chinese takeaway in town. It involved shedding belongings, and tokens of memories via eBay and carboot sales, and added to the emotional burden that long-term unemployment had already dealt us. From five bedrooms, to two. From three bathrooms to one. From a comfortable middle class existence to … well I’m still working that out. I am aware that so very many people have it much worse than us and yet the shock of the change was profound, particularly once the initial flurry of house-moving subsided. We had to begin a process of acclimatising to this small space as we negotiated new territories and developed new routines.

It has always been my habit to map out my surroundings with the use of a camera, using the act of photography to help render the strange, familiar. It helps me feel a connection to a place, and exploring light, textures, and perspectives over a prolonged period of time allows me to show that I have history there; that I belong. Our new home was no different and I decided that the way forward was with a healthy dose of pragmatism. There was no point in mourning the past, or regretting what had been lost. This was our reality now. We had to learn to accept a new kind of life, and make something of it. In this, we are hardly alone. Countless families know and love someone on the autistic spectrum. Scoliosis is far more common than I had ever previously realised and the school that my youngest attends provides support for plenty of other children with visual problems. Families up and down the country are dealing with the emotional and financial devastation that unemployment brings. I recognised that I had an opportunity to use my camera in a therapeutic manner, to work through some of the difficulties that we were experiencing during this rather dramatic adjustment to our lives. I accepted early on that for it to resonate with anyone outside of the immediate family it would have to focus on more than the superficial celebratory shots we might normally expect to find in a family album, and it would have to be honest. That is not to say it needed to be grim. There are positives to our new situation; I love living so near to the Clyde river and make a point of pausing each day to take in the view from our new living room window. And I feel a great sense of gratitude and pride in the way our children have, largely, managed to adapt to sharing a room when previously they all had their own private space. It has not been an easy task and I feel they have accepted the changes better than I could have hoped for, especially when only very shortly after we moved in, I started to document their every move for this work. I have had to ask a great deal of my husband and children, who have not only put up with the constant intrusion but also accepted my use of their images.

The internet has changed our lives in numerous ways but potentially one of the most far reaching changes has been our ability to share photographs, with multitudes of people almost instantly. In asking my children to participate in this project, I could not tell them with any certainty where the images would go, nor who would see them. In order to offer an honest portrayal of my family, I could not allow the children to only pose for photographs once they were ready. I was not interested in setting up shots of harmony and success. My method was to have the camera almost permanently within reach and to photograph the most mundane moments as well as being there for when tempers flared, or when people were tired, hungry or frustrated. I was involved in an almost constant state of negotiation, reassuring them that I was not out to make them look bad, but equally not interested in flattery. We had several discussions about how I was going to use the work because they needed to understand my intentions if their permissions were to have any validity. Even though there were moments when the children were perhaps less comfortable being photographed, mid-argument, for instance, or in Jonathan’s case when I disrupted his precious routines, overall they were very supportive of the work. 

Most days, when I had the camera on me, there would be an initial awareness of its presence which resulted stilted, unusable shots, but after a few minutes everyone would forget about me, and thus I was able to melt into the background and be ignored. As I was doing this, capturing fights, laughs, quiet moments, screaming matches, I had time to consider my own position. As a mother it is my duty to protect my children and yet here I was, giving myself the role of documenter for a project that would not remain hidden in a family album but which would be made public. This work would not exist without all of my family’s co-operation and so while they largely ignored me and let me get on with the business of photographing them, it is still very much a collaborative work for which I am very grateful.

When I started to study at the Glasgow School of Art, I attended a talk during which we were told of all the support that might be available to us as students should we need it. After all, we were told, a lot can happen in four years. I could not have anticipated just how much would happen to me and my family during my period of study. My husband and I almost entirely swapped roles, with him becoming the primary carer of our children, providing taxi service to netball matches, shopping, doing laundry and feeding us all, while I attended art school and commuted into the city each day. If it was difficult for me to give up the domestic side of my role as a mother and I did struggle to accept things not being done the way that I would do them, it was harder still for him to accept what I think he saw as a demotion to house-husband. But as with so many things, we have had to learn to let go and accept that things are different now. Our family is different now. For instance, we no longer have the space to regularly eat at the table together and as the children are growing and their activities become more disparate, we are more often apart than together. Even when we are all at home at the same time, we, like so many others, often find ourselves in a fragmented state of online connectivity. Taking these photographs allowed me to observe my family objectively. There are things I dislike about the way we are living our lives, but I am also reassured. When I look at the images, I see the discreet particularity of my own family but I also see the universality ‘The Family’. Ultimately though, this is my husband. These are my children. This, now, is my home and this is my family. This, is our album. 

Kathryn Polley

2017