Very often, photographs lie at the heart of a family's history and serve to connect the present with its past experiences, traditions and heritage.
French and Italian Professor Marianne Hirsch and Director of the Hood Museum of Art Timothy Rub will host an opening talk at 7:30 p.m. to discuss the exhibit "The Familial Gaze," which seeks to examine contemporary family photography.
The exhibit opened last weekend and will be shown until July 21.
Hirsch and Rub are the co-curators of "The Familial Gaze," which features the recent photographs and photo collages of 10 leading artists -- Dick Blau, Christian Boltanski, Albert Chong, Darrel Ellis, Joanne Leonard, Sally Mann, Lorie Novak, Art Spiegelman, Larry Sultan, Carrie Mae Weems and Sarah Wells, according to a Hood Museum press release.
Adrienne Hand, the Hood Museum public relations coordinator, wrote in an e-mail message that the program will deal with issues such as the rights of children vs. their parents' artistic freedom, the way people perceive families vs. the way in which they present it in photography and what aspects of domestic life they choose to reveal or conceal.
These artists' representations of the family raise questions about the way in which family pictures can shape our perceptions about our relationships and ourselves.
For some, this means taking photographs of their own families, often through the "gendered" lens of their familial role as a mother or father, lover or child.
Other artists use family snapshots in new constructions or installations, thereby creating very different visions of what actually constitutes a family today.
Mann's pictures of her children offer haunting images of childhood beauty and vulnerability. Blau represents his own family in resolutely unromantic fashion.
Wells' families are gay and lesbian couples, depicted in the predictability of their everyday lives.
In addition to their documentary photography, several of the artists represented in the exhibition manipulate photographic images using a variety of techniques.
"The Familial Gaze" is being presented in conjunction with the Humanities Institute on the topic "Cultural Memory and the Present."
