Photographers who photograph their families

Julia Margaret Cameron.

At 48 years old Cameron was given a camera as a present from her daughter. This was what started off her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied." Cameron was sometimes obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures in the blinding light as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were, in fact, unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced of amateurs in her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also means that we are left with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her.

Cameron was from a family of celebrated beauties, and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. For example, each sister had an attribute which she used as a nickname. Her sisters had nicknames like "beauty". Julia's nickname was "talent". This instilled in Julia an obsession with idealized beauty.

Tina Barney.

Tina Barney  is an American artist photographer best known for her large-scale portraits of her family and close friends, many of whom are well-to-do denizens of New York and New England.

She married, had children, and in the early 1970s moved west with her husband. That move, it seems, changed everything. There was, Barney has said, only so much shopping and skiing she could do. She began to feel bored with the life she was living and felt the need to do something. She also began to feel a need to be on her own. She got a divorce and took up photography.

Barney’s maternal grandfather had introduced her to photography and showed her how to use a camera. She’d begun collecting photographs when she was fairly young—only 26 years old. That was in 1971, during the very earliest stages of what has developed into the photography market. The progression from studying and collecting photographs to picking up a 35mm camera and shooting photographs of her own seems perfectly natural and logical.

She began, not surprisingly, by photographing her family and friends. “Nostalgia,” Barney has said, “is the basis of how I began. The fact that I moved out west, that I missed home so badly, that’s when I noticed how precious and important my home was back there.” Barney soon abandoned her 35mm camera for a large format 8×10 unit, which allowed her to produce massive prints—four by five feet. She was one of the first photographers to produce color prints of that size.

Virgina Beahan.

Virginia Beahan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received a BA degree in English from the Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She has taught at Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art, Wellesley College and is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at Dartmouth College.

 Most of Virginia Beahan's six photographs feature her elderly mother, here just called "Gram,'' who was suffering from senile dementia. These photographs may have been a form of therapy; Beahan says Gram "liked the attention,'' and making these portraits allowed the two of them to achieve a "kind of peace.''

But the artist didn't forsake her own interests when she took on this homebound project. Beahan had been a landscape photographer, and most of the images locate their subjects amid the larger subject of nature. Even the one close-up, "Gram in Black,'' places the woman's face in an open field of color.

Equally personal are Elaine O'Neil's daily photographs of herself with her daughter, "Mother Daughter Posing as Ourselves," made over four years as the girl entered adolescence. These black-and-white works, posed on the fly and with their funky edges unmasked, look sort of old-fashioned in the context of this show - but old-fashioned in a good way. O'Neil's rejection of high-tech ploys gives these 10 dual portraits warmth and immediacy that many of the other pictures lack.

Larry Sultan.

Larry Sultan was an American photographer. His work was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as multiple grants from the NEA. At the time of his death, he was a Distinguished Professor of Photography and Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts.

“There’s some comfort in watching someone else at home. Maybe because you might not have that yourself,” Barney said in a 1995 BOMB interview. “It might have to do with an emotional comfort, as opposed to a materialistic comfort.” These words ring true, even today.

But be sure to look closely at the family portraits. Even though one might think the photographer would be able to capture his or her family in their natural habitat, there’s inevitably going to be some artistic license and direction involved.

Photographer Larry Sultan often shot his parents, placing them in settings and directing expressions that they might not have necessarily made on their own. And his father, Irving, wanted to make sure that was known when images–like Dad on the Bed, 1984 (left)–were exhibited. “ ‘Any time you show that picture,’ ” Sultan said his father told him, “ ‘you tell people that’s not me sitting on the bed looking all dressed up and nowhere to go, depressed. That’s you sitting on the bed, and I am happy to help you with the project, but let’s get things straight here.’”