Mom and Dad are waving goodbye to me. First image in the Leaving and Waving series. Leaving and waving, 1991-2017 © Deanna Dikeman

The anonymous family album is explored through seven projects that reveal the artists’ own Family Stories.  These photographic series – most of them staged – unveil the intimate sphere of the family beyond a purely documentary approach. The photographers explore universal themes such as motherhood, family ties, grief, and reconciliation.

Photography ceases to be a medium for capturing everyday family moments and becomes a gateway to all sorts of surprising ends: healing, depicting hidden stories, revealing emotional bonds.

Some artists, use the camera in a therapeutic way to rebuild connections with the past, to include those who were excluded from the family story, to turn grief into reconciliation, or to transform the gesture of saying goodbye into a ritual that makes separation with loved ones bearable, as Deanna Dikeman wrote, “we never know which time will be the last time we see someone.”

Others reveal stories that remain on the margins of the public discourse: the lives of women restrained by social traditions, the challenges of bicultural couples in a foreign country, and intimate experiences surrounding pregnancy and care.

These narratives, sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholic take us from the personal to the universal. Here, photography does not only preserve the people we cherish; it also allows us to confront what memory tends to hide, forget, or reinvent.

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