‘These are my toys’. Lilac.
Mark Leighton. MA Art Practice and Education
The family album is a site of joy, sadness and conflict. It is a format in which we have all been presented at some time in our lives, it is where the ‘ideal’ of family and home is constructed and reflected. It is the most hotly contested emotional item following the death of one’s parents. Even in the control and editorial decisions that have taken place during its construction we can see conflict, between the author (the current owner of the family album) and with the passive subject. How many of us as children were encouraged to contribute our view of the world to the contents of the album, for example in the setting up of various stills? How many of us as children ever instructed our parents to pose in certain ways? Can the camera and the photograph ever be democratic?
Through the practice of sharing ideas, documentation and editing I have drawn my young children into the work and to a large extent made them the authors of it. Together we have assembled, in various formats, representations of one another and the life we share. The child has a different set of values that should be respected, merged with and presented alongside that of their parents. From this collaboration of ideas, together with the various arrangements we hope that an alternative and inclusive domestic family album has been made. What has emerged and been understood by my children is that the fleeting moment of a photograph can be interpreted differently according to its placement next to other pictures, and that false narratives can be constructed.
mleighton@talktalk.net
