Photographic Skills A: The Family Ties Network

The Family Ties Network is a research group of artists, filmmakers and writers who explore memory, space, place and the family in photography and moving image. Through events, conferences, exhibitions and publications, they aim to investigate a range of issues, encompassing the visual representation of family memories, the family album, oral history, bereavement, displacement, estrangement and the family home.

They were formed after participating in the Family Ties: Recollection and Representation conference held at Senate House, University of London in March 2012, organised by Dr. Sally Waterman. This interdisciplinary event examined the various motivations and approaches used by writers and artists when dealing with family memories, which ranged from the confessional, the therapeutic, the nostalgic, to the celebratory.

Members of The Family Ties Network include Dr. Suze Adams (artist/researcher, University of the West of England), Dr. Nicky Bird (Glasgow School of Art), Jacqueline Butler (Manchester Metropolitan University), Rosy Martin (artist/researcher), Dr. Deborah Schultz (Richmond, American International University London), Lizzie Thynne (Sussex University) and Dr. Sally Waterman (artist/researcher).

About few members of The Family Ties Network

Jacqueline Butler

Jacqueline Butler is an artist and academic living and working in Manchester. In her arts practice her primary interests focus on reflections on time and memory in relation to the photographic and the cinematic, exploring visual narrative and contemplations on the material qualities of the photograph both in its analogue and digital forms. Through her practice she works with photography, digital video, the artist book, writing and curation.

The Other Side of Wonderland: 12 Backgrounds

Jacqueline Butler about her project : The Other Side of Wonderland: 12 Backgrounds alludes to reflections on a collection of photographs that make the sum total of the first twelve years of my daughter’s life, its source material the private family photographic archive. This collection of photographs, the images of my child, suggest to me shadows of past lives. Through the work I attempt to discover past selves, my endeavour is to revive something of, as Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Reverie, the “astonishing being”.

Reference: Jacqueline Butler. (2014). The Other Side of Wonderland: 12 Backgrounds. Retrieved 8 December, 2014, from http://jacquelinebutler.blogspot.co.uk/p/12-backgrounds.html

Dr. Sally Waterman

Sally Waterman’s interdisciplinary arts practice and research is concerned with the interpretation of literature into an elusive form of self-portraiture. She creates poetic still and moving image works that explore memory, place and familial relationships, drawing upon writers such as Henry James, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.