Since I am looking at family and hope to portray them and my relationship to them as they would be in their daily lives without any intentional manipulation, my work can be related to the movement of Realism. Realism was a creative movement which originated in France during the 1850s. Individuals who identified as realists rejected the ideas of Romanticism and revolted against the subject matter and overemphasized emotionalism of the movement. Realism in photography portrays things as they are without any abstract or idealised factors put into to change the image. People usually think of Realism within photography as the ‘truth’, since the images haven’t been edited or manipulated to change what is going on within it. However, this may not always be the case, as an image doesn’t need editing to be untruthful. As Giles Duley said, ‘ There is no truth in photography, only honesty’, which could mean that you never really know what the truth is when it comes to images that you haven’t taken yourself, since factors such as angles and camera lenses can change the real situation, so the only thing a photographer can do is be honest about their work.

Family pictures have been around for hundreds of years, with family photos becoming common around the time the camera was invented. Before the invention of the camera, middle to high class families were able to pay for expensive family portraits to be painted for them. Family has always been a main art subject, with individuals wanting to treasure their loved ones and their family legacy by having either a painting or a photo made of them. As cameras evolved and became more popular, photographers were able to find another way of documenting their families, by taking candid images of them within their lives. The subject of family is generally a topic which is related to Realism as many photographers prefer to capture their family relations as they are within their daily lives, with as little changes as possible. My work is the same, as I am planning to document my family from both London and Jersey and portray my relationship with them as they are normally, making my work related to Realism. I am looking at two photographers who both look at family, Walker Evans and Latoya Ruby Frazier, and both their work can link to Realism as they both document the lives of families and the effects of the economic downfalls that their families are facing.

One photographer whose work is related to Realism is Dorothea Lange, a photographer who took images of farmers and migrant workers during the Great Depression and how this economic downfall affected these individuals. This image of the migrant mother and her children is one of Lange’s most famous images, and this is because it conveys a large amount emotions and stories just by looking at the mother’s facial expression. As a realist photographer, this image has not been altered or manipulated and is a clear idea of what was happening during the time of the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange is quite similar to the photographers I have chosen for my question, Latoya Ruby Frazier and Walker Evans. She looks at the oppression and suffering of people during an economic downfall, such as the Great Depression that both she and Walker Evans were looking at, and her work is documentary-like, showcasing the effects of these events.

Bibliography:

• Parkin(2018), Realism and Honesty in Photography, www.onlandscape.co.uk (https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2018/07/realism-and-honesty-in-photography/)