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Last week, after seeing an exhibition in which all the paintings were set in 1970s Nigeria, I started searching my iPhone for an old photograph of my grandmother that had been digitised and emailed to me years ago by one of my aunts. It’s an image of her at a party and she’s posed — chic and commanding, with bouffant hair and wearing sunglasses indoors — beside a group of seated women. I wanted to show someone her style in early ’70s Nigeria, but it’s also a wonderful photograph because it shows how other women dressed at that time, as well as giving a sense of domestic architecture from that era. It’s a rich image to me for all these reasons.
I’m often looking for this photo and each time I have to scroll through thousands of images on my phone because I haven’t yet created a family “album” folder. I’m old enough to remember when tangible family albums were a common household artefact, at least where I grew up in West Africa. We had stacks of them filled with portrait photographs as well as candid pictures from birthday parties, school performances, Christmas trips to my father’s village, and home visits from friends and extended family. And at random times, one of my siblings or I would pick up an album, open it across our small lap and flip through the thin plastic covered sheets, gazing at memories of our family’s history. Albums were something we shared not just with one another but also with certain visitors who came to the house. It was an unspoken, ritualised way of remembering our stories and telling some of those stories to others.
Family albums were memories of the past that said something about our individual and collective journey to the present. These days, digital photos and social media accounts are the most common and consistent archives of our lives. Lately I’ve found myself quite nostalgic for the idea of the family album. I’m not necessarily suggesting it should return in the old form, but I’m wondering how the idea of the family album could still shape the way we think about memory-making today, who gets featured in the family albums of our lives and what it could mean to think more intentionally of how our present actions are making future memories.
In the 2023 painting “Family Forum” by Cologne-based contemporary Nigerian artist Peter Uka, we enter a scene of six relatives gathered in a heavily furnished living room. An LP collection, record player and black-and-white TV suggest a historical time period, and the books on the wall and the side table indicate a family that values reading. On the coffee table is a plate of kola nut, a fruit of West Africa that is used in many ways but commonly presented to show respect to the elders in a family or community. The fact that the plate is placed in front of the man who is speaking suggests that he is a visiting senior relative. He’s gesturing to the three other men, who listen intently on the left side of the canvas, while two women sit and stand respectively on the right side of the canvas. The woman standing in the colourful striped dress is probably the one who served the kola nut, but her stance is defensive: shoulders back, hips forward and an expression of displeasure on her face. Perhaps she’s not keen on being the one serving while the men sit around and talk. Perhaps, through her character, the artist is nodding to the ways in which traditional patriarchal norms play into all areas of society.
I like this painting — which is currently on show at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Paris — because it invites viewers to recall their own family gatherings and to question how ideas were exchanged, and who carried the conversations. And peeking out just beneath the coffee table is a family album, identifiable by the detail of the decorated cover and by where it’s placed. One could imagine the scene of the painting itself placed on a page in the album.
Family albums are usually full of photographs that capture celebratory or playful moments in our lives. We don’t tend to document the traumas or heartbreaks. But looking at this work made me think about how our visual narratives of what it means to be a family — for good or bad, and whether in memories or in photos — are woven into our present life experiences. We all carry family albums within us, and it would be telling to figure out which stages of our lives, or which family members, take up the most space, and to explore the reasons why.
The work of the 20th-century portraitist Alice Neel, often reminds me of family photographs, but because she painted people from different ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds her work also makes me think of how we learn to broaden our concept of who makes up our family, and whose images are of value to us. During her time living in Harlem, New York, in the 1930s and ’40s, Neel painted soul-stirring portraits of children, neighbours, store clerks and other people she encountered. These works have come to serve as a sort of mid-century archive of certain communities in New York.
One of my favourite paintings is “Two Girls, Spanish Harlem’‘ from 1959, which shows two children sitting and staring intently at the viewer. The young girl in the foreground wears a grey and white pinafore dress, and her head is tilted and cradled against the palm of her right hand, while her other hand rests on the table behind. Her gaze is intense, both questioning and openly invested in the viewer. The young girl behind her in the red and black dress seems less direct, simply willing to return the viewer’s stare. There is an unexpected air of gravitas to these little children that makes them feel like real people to be reckoned with and respected.
I love this painting because it seems to permit the girls just to be themselves as their image is captured. There’s no command to sit up straight or to place their hands in their laps. It moves me to consider who I might make room for in my proverbial family album if I imagined my family as extending into my neighbourhood, my community and perhaps even beyond the borders of my city, and country. Who is not being seen? Who is not being given the space to show up as their full self without trepidation? What scenes might be celebrated and documented in a global family album, and what stories would they tell about all of us?
I love Vincent van Gogh’s, December 1889 painting “Women Picking Olives”. He made three versions of this painting, each one defining the women more clearly. Three women gather olives in a landscape of wavy green trees against a pink-cream sky and grey rolling earth. This may seem an odd picture through which to consider the idea of a family album. But as I’ve thought about how these artefacts serve to remind us about our past histories, and perhaps even ongoing legacies, I’ve realised that the lives we’re immersed in now will provide the raw material for the next generation’s albums.
Van Gogh’s painting offers one specific way I could imagine this: the practice of planting and protecting trees. In their natural lifespan most trees will outlive us, and I love to consider how many generations of families might interact with that olive grove, somewhere in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the painting over time, and how it feeds into the stories of place and people that make us who we are. What if we thought of our present lives as embodied memories in action — and our actions in the world, from how we make space for one another to how we care for the ecosystems that nurture us, as making pages for a global family album?
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