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Table of Contents
IN FOCUS
Family Portraits Adrift
Anne O’Hehir (2014/ 2025)
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| #AOH 5-01, 5-02, 5-03: Unknown photographers, family portraits c 1910, c 1912 & c 1917 |
These three images are in many ways typical of the family portraits in the National Gallery’s collection of Dutch colonial photography. They reveal much about the time, but keep as many secrets. In the earliest of the three, a man and his family pose in a studio.
True to form, he wears the white jas tutup jacket, white trousers and white shoes of a Dutch official. On either side sit his two daughters, both close; his arm is around the younger one, who nestles in; her arm resting on him; his hand on her knee; her chin is lifted and confident and her expression more open than her older sister’s. She looks like the typical youngest daughter, a little spoilt, a little cheeky. Their mother, possibly Javanese, stands behind.
We find them again a couple of years later, this time possibly at home. Again, the father sits and the youngest daughter sits close, holding his hand. The third image is taken back in a studio setting. The mother sits and her older daughter and husband stand sentinel on either side. The younger daughter’s absence is a shock.
When family album photographs are cut loose from their moorings and float free, they become enigmatic and mysterious. An explanation of the failure of the younger daughter to appear in the final image is ungraspable, inexplicable. Was she elsewhere on the day, away at school perhaps, or is there a more tragic reason, a darker fate, death even, that accounts for her absence?
Unrestrained by the facts of the case, the viewer’s imagination roams free. It is little wonder, then, that vernacular photography has fascinated contemporary conceptual photomedia artists who revel in the often effortless integrity and accidental strangeness of such photographs. There is a sense that the people in the images must now valiantly speak for themselves; but, disconcertingly, all we have to go on is appearance.
The viewer most often has nobody’s names, no way to grasp the relationships or the nature of the relationships between the people depicted and no way of knowing what has happened outside the frame in time or space—at least not without extensive research, and even then.
It is disconcerting to realise how little photographs can reveal, how good they are at remaining silent. This set of images is a wonderful example of the powerful way in which photographs can provoke the viewer’s emotional engagement across time.
The three portrait photographs
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| #AOH 5-01: Unknown photographer, family portrait c 1910 |
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| #AOH 5-02: Unknown photographer, family portrait c 1912 |
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| #AOH 5-03: Unknown photographer, family portrait c 1917 |
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