Rethinking the Family Album. Research

Photographers

Erwin Wurm

Me and my sister are living abroad and I got interested how people from different country may see us. What we are doing differently, how we behave and what our traditions are. One of the practitioners, who showed how strange sometimes people may look like is Austrian artist  Erwin Wurm. He in his series How to be politically incorrect debunks sanctimonious attitudes using humour to tackle serious underlying issues. This series continuous his desire to turn everyday activities into art. 

Reference: Susan Bright. (2011). Art photography now. (2nd edition). United Kingdom: Thames & Hudson.  

Iiu Susiraja

Thinking about unusual behaviour that me and my sister may do, I looked up at the Finnish photographer Iiu Susiraja, who took brutally honest, surreal and unflinchingly funny self-portraits using her own body and other objects as props at home. Differently to Erwin Wurm she takes pictures of herself and turns everyday life into an art.  She states that everyday life is her muse. This series of pictures proves that “abnormal may me normal”.

Reference:  Dazed Digital. (2014). Iiu Susiraja's body talking selfies. Retrieved 8 December, 2014, from http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/22129/1/iiu-susirajas-body-talking-selfies

Alessandra Sanguinetti

The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams it is a series of images of relationship between two cousins over five year period. Guille and Belinda were ten and nine years old when Sanguinetti began to photograph them. These pictures reveal girls desires and dreams of their active imaginations, intimacy and closeness between them.  

Penny Klepuszewska

Living arrangements investigates our ageing population. One in ten elderly people spend their lives utterly alone, often with deteriorating health and no family support to hand; the home usually a place of shelter becomes an island of isolation.

In this series of photographs she took objects from people’s home, removed from their original context and photographed them in the studio. These pictures are similar to Dutch paintings. Objects are harshly lit, placed in the one side of the picture leaving an empty black space around them. So the background doesn't distract and the viewer can concentrate on objects.

Maja Daniels

Photographer Maja Daniels has been documenting the synchronized lives of identical twins, Monette and Mady against the backdrop of the streets of Paris. They share close relationship as sisters and also they act, model and dance together. Since a great part of Mady and Monettes’s lives is about performing this series of pictures shows how sisters interact naturally as they go about their daily business.

Thomas Ruff

Ruff asks his models to assume a neutral expression, and most of them choose to face the camera front-on, posed against a white background under even, shadowless studio light. Deadpan images – no smile, no emotion, just person being similar to passport photos. These images are enlarged to about six feet high, so in the result we can examine every mole, pimple, pore and tear duct in the sitter’s face.

Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth portraits of families are deadpan images. Pictures without a social mask reveal how families act and behave in their natural environment when they are told to be neutral. In this series of pictures we can see their body language, how they sit, what relation is with other family members.  Similar to Thomas Ruff work this images show people as they are.