Family photographs:

...It is almost certainly true that we can't have it both ways...

...They must also be prepared to make their own set of mistakes...

...They were putting on their own impromptu religious procession...

...My son, looking at the pictures, comments on how formal they are...

...My wife's family experiences a similar disconnection...

...On the other hand is the tendency to see family as a specific form of hell and soul-crashing oppression from which it is only reasonable to want to escape...

...You might be able to count on a cousin or uncle in time of need, and the corollary was that you also had to be dependable, willing to offer similar help...

...We are in touch, most of us, and know generally what the family news is...

...With each new generation, a new set of mistakes is made, and children must forgive their parents...

...In traditional societies one puts up with a less than satisfactory life for the sake of something higher...

...Maybe the photographs themselves are acknowledgments of how fragile and self-conscious that reality is now...

...We need our heaven, as well as our hell, on this side of death...

...For family to work at all well, some self-sacrifice is required, and not infrequently quite a bit of it...

...This sense exists against-a countervailing tide...

...The reasons we see the family mythologized as heaven or hell could be that ours is an agnostic culture...

...Our culture is full of the fear that comes when there is no agreement about what we may expect from one another, what constitutes decent individual and collective behavior, what I could expect (for example) from a crowd of onlookers if I were attacked on the street or on a railway platform...

...Often it is more draining: parents cope with raising a child born with Down's syndrome, or deal with the emotional difficulty of a troubled child, or, in what is probably one of the most difficult trials of all, adult children live with and care for a parent whose mind is slowly being canceled by Alzheimer's disease...

...I know it is threatened because I am part of the problem...

...There are photographs like this in my own family-formal, somewhat stiff-looking assemblies of people who have blood or connecting marriages in common...

...he beat his little nephews and nieces because they were singing "Ave Maria...

...the area has been turned into a sports complex...

...It could be that what we hope to celebrate in family reunions and self-conscious group photographs is the hope that we will be there for one another in difficult times, because of a connection which is more than accidental...

...What is new is the extreme set of interpretations we bring to the meaning of family...

...A network of mutual obligations ties people together in most traditional societies, and still binds many of us...

...I do not want to suggest that an uncritical belief in tribal and communal forms of understanding is all we really need...

...I wonder whether they may be relics of a period which lasted for a couple of generations after the development of photography, but points back to an older reality, one which is eroding fast...

...This is a good, unsentimental thing...

...We mourn the loss of a communal understanding, the tribal sense...

...At the Same time we do not really want any responsibility which could inconvenience us...

...She is looking very thoughtful and a little distracted...

...We feel unprotected by a surrounding agreement, a shared moral understanding, which we sense should be there and is not...

...We are, like it or not, related to and responsible for one another...

...It is not and cannot be a form of heaven...

...However, I know people from family backgrounds so abusive that they are left wounded for life, their relationships with other people permanently and negatively affected...

...Blood may be thicker than water, but it is thinner than something else (convenience...

...My wife has stories about a lot of these people, some of them funny, some tragic, some a combination of the two, like the story of an uncle who was wakened from a hangover by the sound of children singing...

...This means not only deferred gratification, another thing our culture is no good at...

...These examples of love and self-sacrifice impress almost all of us, but they are not encouraged by a culture which stresses self-satisfaction and selffulfillment...

...Rogers...

...There is a tendency to romanticize the family and to see in its intimacy a paradise from which we may be cast out unless we behave in just the right ways and hold just the right values...

...There are opposite tendencies at work in the popular images we have of what family means, the ones which show up on television, in the movies, and in fiction...

...One is that at the economic level we do not need family bonds as we once did, though our emotional needs remain...

...it appears that way to us because that formality points to deep connections and networks of obligation which are not congruent with our culture...

...She and her brothers and sisters and cousins were assembled in rows, with her grandfather at the center, in the yard of a house which has since been torn down...

...Photographs of these gatherings, and family reunions, have 'a self-consciousness which something truly present and strong might not require...

...Another and more insidious cause is that family life is, at its center, opposed to the individualism which our culture promotes...

...self-involvement...

...It can mean putting up with people with whom you would otherwise have nothing to do...

...Most of the bond, which traditionally kept families close and made relatives people you could count on, probably was formed as a defense against a harsh social climate outside, a hedge against times of scarcity...

...All of the men in the photograph are dead now...

...The point is that the formality of grouped families in photographs strikes us as formal not because it is "old- fashioned...

...A family photograph is about something which is in fact threatened, and at its best has virtues the culture does not encourage.oes not encourage...

...At the simplest level, this can involve money and its use...

...Some forms of family loyalty are destructive and finally unloving, and some forms of self-sacrifice are pointless and stultifying...

...sometimes the gratification isn't there at all...

...In our culture nothing encourages the belief that there is anything beyond the self...

...Neither of these pictures is entirely false, and one hopes that most of our experiences are considerably closer to the paradisiacal model than the hellish one...

...it may be no more than the feeling that in self-sacrifice one is obeying the will of God and moving beyond the self...

...One shows her in the front row of a number of children, aged four or five...

...Members of my family have tried to get together for reunions of cousins and I have begged off, because, for reasons of work or finances, I really couldn't be there...

...Each couple enters parenthood vowing not to make some of the same mistakes their parents made in raising them or setting them an example, and no doubt these attempts are often successful...

...He makes W.C...

...we do not want to sacrifice the right of the self to pursue satisfaction independently...

...One man whose family relationships have been very difficult told me that although he loved his father, he had come to understand that he didn't like him much at all...

...But these photographs and deliberate gatherings are also attempts-good ones, necessary ones-to affirm something important, and it could be that we would not pay so much attention to them if we did not sense that something they are meant to represent is threatened...

...Something is happening to families and to our sense of family...

...However, a couple of other things ought to be noted...

...Other photos show her father gathered with his brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands...

...parents put off painting the house or forget about buying a car to help a child get through school or pay off school debts...

...This was, no doubt, always true...

...But getting together is difficult, and although geographical distance is an important factor it is not the only distance...

...It isn't heaven...

...And even people from generally happy, stable backgrounds have reasons to regret much of their family's common life...

...They are crowded photos, with parents or grandparents at the center...

...But it seems to bind fewer of us together with every generation...

...Some frequently cited causes are the mobility of our society and the frequency of divorce, and no doubt these do have something to do with it...

...but when those gatherings involved my grandparents, dead now, I was there...

...Fields look like Mr...

...I wonder how many more generations will know photos like this...

...OF SEVERAL HINDS John Garvey FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS CONNECTING ALL THE DOTS My wife recently brought together a number of photo-graphs from her childhood in the Philippines, sepia prints taken only a few years after the end of World War II...

...I say "might not" because it makes sense to record a good time or a rare gathering, and to gather people deliberately is a fine, celebratory instinct...