Two basic approaches have shaped this photographic work of exploration and contestation, and both trends are clearly visible in these exhibitions. A first group of artists seemingly record family members and family relationships in real time preserving, even in their posed portraits, the documentary aura of family snapshots. And yet, at the same time, they comment on the conventions of family photography. This trend is exemplified by photographers such as Sally Mann, Larry Sultan, Nan Goldin, Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca Dicorcia, Vance Gellert, Nicholas Nixon, Judith Black, Doug DuBois and Dick Blau. More complex techniques of projection, collage, super-imposition and installation characterize a second trend in contemporary familial self-representation that includes artists like Lorie Novak, Lorna Simpson, Pat Ward Williams, Clarissa Sligh, Art Spiegelman, Albert Chong, Tatana Kellner, Darrel Ellis, and Carrie Mae Weems. Although the artists in both groups comment on the conventions of family photography, they raise a number of distinct questions.

The images exemplifying the first trend offer familial subjects a mirror in which to see themselves reflected in a life narrative that shapes personal and familial memory. Their photographs are close to the snapshots that any of us might have in our own albums. Yet they are also markedly different, and not just in technical quality. Mostly, they tend to make visible, in various ways, what most family snapshots wish to deny in their unselfconsciousness - the ways in which the presence of the camera shapes family relationships into performances, and, conversely, the ways in which the images reveal the staged and performative aspects of all family relationships. In the family we play our roles - of mother, father, sister, brother, spouse, parent or child - for each other, as well as for the familial gaze we have internalized. The looks we exchange fix us in our roles; and it is as such that we engage each other and the viewers. In the photographic work of these contemporary artists, we can read this process of familial construction and subject-formation through the exchanges of looking.

Whichever of these two trends they might most closely align themselves with, the photographers who photograph their family lives and their domestic spaces have made not just the family but family pictures themselves - the family's technologies of representation - the objects of scrutiny and representation. More than other representational media, photography has the effect of naturalizing cultural practices and of disguising their stereotyped and coded characteristics. As photography immobilizes the flow of family life into a series of snapshots, it perpetuates familial myths while seeming merely to record actual moments in family history. Yet these artists go beyond the conventional and opaque surfaces of family photographs. They search for techniques by which they can expose the complicated and layered, contradictory and incomprehensible stories of familial relation - the passions and rivalries, the tensions and problems - that have, for the most part, remained outside of family albums. These artists thus attempt to use the very instruments of ideology, the camera, the album and the familial gaze, as modes of questioning, resistance, and contestation. They show that by disrupting the documentary authority and the evidentiary status of the photograph, they can use photography as a powerful weapon of social and attitudinal change. They can do so by challenging our expectations, and by teaching us to see differently. They thus interrogate, quite self-consciously, aspects of familial representation that tend to remain invisible in conventional photos - the role of ethnicity (Jewishness, for example), gender, sexuality, race, age and power in the construction of familiality, identity and subjectivity. At the same time, these artists use family pictures as instruments of self-knowledge and self-representation, as a way to examine their own roles within the family and the role of familiality in their own self-conception.