everyone says I do. I hate my brother, often we hate our siblings, so a family resemblance colludes against your difference against your will. Blood tells the story, it seems to say, of which you are a part, and like tragedy can’t be escaped.
But what does comedy tell? Like about Great Uncle Charley, the buffoon, comic, teaser, the man who didn’t know that women piss and shit. Or was his life a tragedy? Was there an inevitability to it? In comedy, the only inevitability is surprise, an unforeseen punch line; guess it, and it’s not funny. Uncle Charley—his life’s a toss up, he was always funny, everyone said, then he died and his terrible secret came out that wasn’t funny, and it was a surprise. Tragedy can’t be a complete shock; it must build and build to a foreseeable end, which can’t ever be avoided. I can’t see any of it in the family photographs. But a family resemblance shares that attribute—it can’t be avoided. You can’t escape what it says about you.
After people die, my mother put it, all that remains are photographs, that’s why we take them. Then she said to me, more sharply, Your interest in the family photos is morbid, the photos, videos, you’re holding on to your childhood, it’s sick. I ignored her and still do, even though she’s dead. Often when people die, you reconsider their statements. I just look at their pictures.
Time goes on, your sacred films and tapes of weddings and communions are hidden away, everyone wants to have them, few look at them again, most are just kept images. I hardly knew so-and-so, there she is forever, but I don’t have to look at her, either. The matte or glossy snapshots, in a drawer or album, represent a past, stand as an implacable memory, stored away against time, and even if in time you recognize no one and nothing by them, even if you have the memory only because the photo exists, it’s a kind of elegy to a reality, a fact or document from the distant past, a memento mori. Or, as Claire’s ghost-brother Nate whispered to her in the finale of HBO’s Six Feet Under , when she was shooting their family before leaving home, “That’s already gone.”
When they die, even clowns sometimes morph into tragic heroes. Take Great Uncle Charley. I stare at his photos, ranging from when he was three, posing for a professional in town, sticking his finger up his nose in a high school graduation photograph, his eyes bugging out at a party after his college graduation, looking boisterous with the Not-So-Tall basketball team, or beaming as he cuts the cake with his bride, Margaret, and on and on. Three years before he died, there’s an arresting one of him with his head drooping to the side, a melancholy expression on his face. I want to peel away the emulsion, get under that sad-sack image, and find out his secret. It’s a primitive urge maybe, or a silly or naive feeling, but no matter what I might seem to know about the fiction and illusion of images, I’m also still that little boy rushing around, curious, trying to find out what’s what, and who, like Great Uncle Charley, is shocked at what I see that no one told me would be there. I want other pictures to efface what I do know, to show me another world, I want to kill images, burn them, like some of my brother. Photographs aren’t real that way.
In my next book, I’m broaching treacherous ground and taking up some cultural questions around images, specifically, a photographer’s disposition—the subject behind the camera—and the effects of family resemblance. When an artist pictures a family member, what’s the psychological impact of a family resemblance on the artist? Is the image also a self-portrait, when the shooter “resembles” the one who poses and so also sees himself or herself? How does the sociology of the American family—for instance, sibling order—affect images? Whose “I”/“eye” can be trusted, if trust is an issue in art, and why? From what I learned in my
But what does comedy tell? Like about Great Uncle Charley, the buffoon, comic, teaser, the man who didn’t know that women piss and shit. Or was his life a tragedy? Was there an inevitability to it? In comedy, the only inevitability is surprise, an unforeseen punch line; guess it, and it’s not funny. Uncle Charley—his life’s a toss up, he was always funny, everyone said, then he died and his terrible secret came out that wasn’t funny, and it was a surprise. Tragedy can’t be a complete shock; it must build and build to a foreseeable end, which can’t ever be avoided. I can’t see any of it in the family photographs. But a family resemblance shares that attribute—it can’t be avoided. You can’t escape what it says about you.
After people die, my mother put it, all that remains are photographs, that’s why we take them. Then she said to me, more sharply, Your interest in the family photos is morbid, the photos, videos, you’re holding on to your childhood, it’s sick. I ignored her and still do, even though she’s dead. Often when people die, you reconsider their statements. I just look at their pictures.
Time goes on, your sacred films and tapes of weddings and communions are hidden away, everyone wants to have them, few look at them again, most are just kept images. I hardly knew so-and-so, there she is forever, but I don’t have to look at her, either. The matte or glossy snapshots, in a drawer or album, represent a past, stand as an implacable memory, stored away against time, and even if in time you recognize no one and nothing by them, even if you have the memory only because the photo exists, it’s a kind of elegy to a reality, a fact or document from the distant past, a memento mori. Or, as Claire’s ghost-brother Nate whispered to her in the finale of HBO’s Six Feet Under , when she was shooting their family before leaving home, “That’s already gone.”
When they die, even clowns sometimes morph into tragic heroes. Take Great Uncle Charley. I stare at his photos, ranging from when he was three, posing for a professional in town, sticking his finger up his nose in a high school graduation photograph, his eyes bugging out at a party after his college graduation, looking boisterous with the Not-So-Tall basketball team, or beaming as he cuts the cake with his bride, Margaret, and on and on. Three years before he died, there’s an arresting one of him with his head drooping to the side, a melancholy expression on his face. I want to peel away the emulsion, get under that sad-sack image, and find out his secret. It’s a primitive urge maybe, or a silly or naive feeling, but no matter what I might seem to know about the fiction and illusion of images, I’m also still that little boy rushing around, curious, trying to find out what’s what, and who, like Great Uncle Charley, is shocked at what I see that no one told me would be there. I want other pictures to efface what I do know, to show me another world, I want to kill images, burn them, like some of my brother. Photographs aren’t real that way.
In my next book, I’m broaching treacherous ground and taking up some cultural questions around images, specifically, a photographer’s disposition—the subject behind the camera—and the effects of family resemblance. When an artist pictures a family member, what’s the psychological impact of a family resemblance on the artist? Is the image also a self-portrait, when the shooter “resembles” the one who poses and so also sees himself or herself? How does the sociology of the American family—for instance, sibling order—affect images? Whose “I”/“eye” can be trusted, if trust is an issue in art, and why? From what I learned in my
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