Looking at the Legacy of '90s Family Portraiture

Family photos are some of our most precious possessions. Whether they are made to be seen or kept private, the material is as important to those captured as those it affects. Reviewing the cells of this social body, four particular photographers from the 1990s who questioned the format’s rites, rules, and mechanisms come to mind. From Michael Clegg and Yair Martin Guttmann, who distantly and meticulously photographed power families; to Richard Billingham’s spontaneous and dirty realism; the tenebrous Southern Gothic style of Sally Mann; or the sumptuously classic imagery by Carrie Mae Weems; their bodies of work disclose the dynamics and complexities of family portraiture.

Beginning at the height of the U.S. stock market boom of the 1980s, Wall Street bankers had portraits taken for their annual reports in the tradition of 18th century Dutch paintings, in which the rising industrial bourgeoisie demanded to be immortalized. Influenced by this historical lineage during the decade obsessed with the image and a sense for conceptual irony, Clegg and Guttman emerged. The artist duo has operated a formal crossover between the borrowed classicism of Swiss watch ad campaigns and Anthony van Dyck canons, ultimately questioning the representations of power and the stratagems that constitute them. Presented in the 1987 exhibition Fake: A Meditation on Authenticity at the New Museum in New York City, curated by William Olander, their portraits highlight the family photograph as a weapon of a social game. Enthroned on the catalogue’s cover, a work titled “An American Family: A Rejected Commission” looks as arrogant as it is sinister.

In the photograph, a family poses against a voluptuously obscure background with martial-looking figures emerging from the darkness of global finance. The parents sit at the base with an earthly confidence, while the children stand by, ready to take up the torch. The father is dazzled, the color of his Cifonelli tie already tarnished by his own mortality. The son, on the other hand, wears a tight smile that struggles to conceal a snide look inherited from his failed years at Bennington College (a time and place memorably depicted in Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction). At the center of the scene, the mother looks like the Duchess of Guermantes teleported in from the HBO series Succession. More than just the family, the photograph represents the social body; an aggregation of mutual interests, a pack that marks its territory through showmanship. The psychology of the individual becomes the attitude of a class. As its title indicates, the portrait was rejected by the commissioning clients.

In contrast to Clegg and Guttmann’s acidic view of the ruling class, Richard Billingham presented intimate snapshots of his family when he was an art student in London. Titled Sensation, the show was organized by Charles Saatchi at the Royal Academy in 1997. Billingham’s photography typically features his parents, Ray and Liz, and brother, Jason, in a decrepit flat on the outskirts of Birmingham in the north west of England. Taken mostly without his subjects’ attention, Billingham’s shots capture an unpolished and brutal reality whose yellowed grain reinforces its expressiveness. Developed on inexpensive prints, the form marries the content and contributes to this diffused feeling of dirty realism. His mother has tattooed arms and chain smokes cigarettes. His father is seemingly always drunk and haggard. Unemployed, Billingham’s brother alleviates his boredom with hard drugs and Britpop. It’s 1997, and England’s disenfranchised are paying the price of eight years of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. In the middle of the family’s living room, a cat and dog make their way between the furniture where knick-knacks, jigsaw puzzles of exotic destinations never visited, carnivalesque Venetian masks, and empty beer bottles reside. The bodies are jarringly human: they scream, belch, laugh, ingest, exhale, and expel. One thinks of a bestiary: Billingham’s small flat is a den or a lair where a family takes refuge from a hostile outside world. The spectator is confronted by an intimacy that is sometimes sad, burlesque, or embarrassing, but still caught in a game of promiscuity and emotional intensity.

The tenderness in Billingham’s gaze is nevertheless not absent. Rather than an obvious affiliation with a post-punk aesthetic à la Nan Goldin, the photographs are instead inspired by British realism. Indeed, the photographer shares a taste for the representation of domestic ennui and proletarian realities with the Victorian painter Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group. In a more contemporary way, it is English realist cinematography that comes to mind, like Bill Douglas’ autobiographical trilogy My Childhood, My Ain Folk, and My Way Home (or Ken Loach’s dramas Kes or Riff-Raff). More recently, in 2018, Billingham adapted his tumultuous series of photographs into a film entitled Ray and Liz, which won prizes at the Toronto and Locarno film festivals. As Brit-lit star Nick Hornby said of the artist’s photographs: “Even if they do nothing else, they do detain you.”

Another crucial landmark in matters of family portraiture in the ‘90s is the sumptuous series of domestic photographs by American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The Kitchen Table Series consists of 20 black-and-white photographs and 14 pieces of text written in third person of various scenarios depicting a woman’s day in the kitchen. Rigorous and sober, all the photographs have a single light source illuminating from the ceiling, and are taken from the same angle at the end of the table. At once sanctuary and confessional, a refuge and a battlefield, the kitchen is an assigned and gendered space, but also the one where all negotiations take place. In what remains a Bildungsroman, we follow a woman embodied by Mae Weems through daily activities. She plays cards, engages in political debates, puts on makeup with her daughter, has dinner with her husband, and feeds a caged bird. There is a kind of choreography involved, in which the table becomes a domestic stage. This series is emphatically cinematographic, as if we are witnessing a framed shot—the place of the perceptible and the controllable—subject to whirlwinds provoked by external life, the counter-shot. Of her photographs, Mae Weems’ longtime friend Mike Kelley said: “Her images are obviously constructed and don’t represent themselves as being factual; rather, they have a mythic dimension that forces you to deal in a more complex way.”

The Kitchen Table Series is an intimate odyssey that questions the power balance within a family and relationships. Despite the identifiable factual elements, Mae Weems’ photographs are shrouded in mystery. They are enigmatic scenarios; we never know if the situations will lead to a happy or sad outcome. It is all about the pleasure and terror of being at home. One is sometimes reminded of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s elegant grey paintings of women, alone, waiting in the darkness of their flats like Madame Bovary. Mae Weems’ photographs share the same tension between an almost anthropological gaze and a formal intensity, revealing the lyricism of everyday family existence between courage, modesty, and resignation.