These unexpected family photos will make you rethink relationships

Updated:2024-05-24 14:43    Views:169

Yang Shaoming - 'Deng Xiaoping' — What do China's stolid Communist Party leaders look like behind the propaganda posters? A lot like us, it turns out. Yang Shaoming's candid series capture the lives of leaders, including China's former president Deng Xiaoping. courtesy yang shaoming Frankie Chan - 'Pets' Human Families' — People in Hong Kong adore their animals too. In this whimsical photo series, Frankie Chan reimagines the family photo from the perspective of pets, or in this case, a cat on his birthday. courtesy frankie chan Masashi Asada - 'Asadake' — In this uproarious photo project, Japanese photographer Masashi Asada stages his family members in a variety of increasingly outlandish situations. Each photo requires careful planning that involves the whole family. As the artist explains, these "fake memories" have become some of the family's most cherished real memories. courtesy masashi asada Franz Lai - 'Tied' — Photography is a medium that suggests relationships between subjects simply by placing them together in the same frame. Lai drives this home by asking his subjects to bind themselves together in an arrangement of their own choosing, as if to question how we picture our own family ties. courtesy franz lai Fan Ho - 'Streets as Families' — A legendary master of Hong Kong street photography, Fan Ho passed away earlier this year but dedicated a set of previously unseen images to this exhibition. In these light-filled shots of 1960s Hong Kong, Ho interprets children playing on the streets as a precious kind of familial relationship. courtesy fan ho Almond Chu - 'Family Portrait' — We're a lot like our family members, but just how much? In this installation, Almond Chu hung a photo of himself, printed on a glass panel, in front of a series of photos of his relatives. The result is uncanny -- it's hard to tell where the family ends and the self begins. courtesy Almond Chu Chan Dick - 'Afterglow' — After Hong Kong artist Chan Dick's father passed away, he stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep, as hazy memories flitted across his mind. In his video installation, viewers are invited to experience these fragmented images for themselves, while lying in a real bed. courtesy hong kong international photo festival Joe Lau - 'It's late' — Hong Kong is known for its cramped, sometimes isolating living spaces. In this series, photographer Joe Lau explores the meaning of family to the city's residents who live alone. "In reality, many of us are only a dweller requiring a place to live and survive," he says. courtesy joe lau Lau Chi Chung - 'Lost Family' — Lau Chi Chung combines old, anonymous photographs -- discovered on the artist's treasure hunts around the city -- with photos of the artist's own, creating dreamlike relationships between unrelated people in different times and spaces. courtesy lau chi chung Dick Lau - 'Diminish' — Hong Kong is a city of disappearance: Buildings, cultures, politics are constantly erased, nothing seems permanent. With his series 'Diminish,' Lau inverts the typical subject/background relationship by blurring out families while leaving landscapes intact, suggesting that our relationships are the most fragile of all. courtesy dick lau John Choy - 'It's late' — In his dystopic photographs, John Choy poses the question: Can we have a real sense of family if we don't have a sense of home? Focusing on unpeopled public spaces in Hong Kong, Choy evokes the listlessness of a disappearing city in which even familial ties ring hollow. courtesy john choy Dick Lau - 'Return' — In this moving series, Dick Lau asked bedridden elderly patients where they would go if they could explore the world again. He then printed large-scale backdrops and staged family trips in front of them, right inside the hospital. "They are in the last stages of life. For them, money or success no longer matter, just how much more time they can have with their family," says Lau. courtesy dick lau Chang Lin - 'Family' — Not your average photographer, Chang Lin left his profession and family to become a monk. His series takes a philosophical view on the family — "If you feel the world with your heart, you will see families in different combinations in each and every corner, but not just humans." courtesy hong kong international photo festival Doreen Chan - '28.6 (60.2)' — Step inside Doreen Chan's room-sized video installation and you'll be confronted by a projection of rapidly flashing snapshots from her daily life A plate of vegetables, dirty clothes, a kitchen counter. The floor of the room is littered with trash bags full of Chan's personal belongings, evoking the tension the artist feels living in the same apartment as her mother. It's a a vivid embodiment of the generational frictions often seen in Hong Kong, where many residents live with their parents well into adulthood. courtesy hong kong international photo festival Hong Kong International Photo Festival 2016 -- 1000 families in one room Prev Next Story highlights

A new Hong Kong photography exhibition revisits the traditional family snapshot with clever twists on the widely-used genre

From the quirky to the totally unexpected, these unusual pictures challenge preconceived ideas of relationships

August 19 is World Photo Day

CNN  — 

If there’s a universal photo style – besides the selfie – it might be the family photo. Nearly everyone’s taken one. Arrange people in front of a lens. One, two, three, say cheese! But does the family make the photo, or does the photo make the family?

That’s the question asked by a new exhibition at the Hong Kong International Photo Festival that explores how family photos – from the ordinary to the absurd – determine how we think about our own relationships.

Pictures by legendary master of Hong Kong street photography, Fan Ho, feature in the exhibition. Ordinary photos?

Take the seemingly plain looking photo of grandparents with their grandchild in a homely living room. A placid old man reclines in an armchair with a newspaper, his feet propped up wearing wooly socks. At his side, a child sits on an elderly woman’s lap while they read together.

Here’s the twist: The man is China’s former president Deng Xiaoping, more often pictured in bombastic propaganda posters than in candid home shots. But you don’t need to know that to read the relationships, because family photos speak a language we all understand – whether we’re common people or Communist leaders. 

For many artists in this show, the family photo’s simple conventions are what make it a ripe genre for play and subversion. 

Japanese photographer Masashi Asada struggled to decide which family events he wanted to take pictures of, so he began to stage his father, mother, and brother in fantastical scenarios.

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In one shot, he poses along with his loved ones as rock stars, shredding on stage at an underground show. In another, they pretend to be an intimidating yakuza family, with every detail painstakingly considered.

He says his approach to family photos isn’t about the past, but rather an imagined future. They’re about how we’re going through constant change. 

“All four of us could conceivably become yakuza,” he jokes.

Hong Kong’s Lau Chi Chung creates a different kind of family fiction. He juxtaposes carefully selected old photographs of anonymous residents – discovered through treasure hunts around the city – with new photos of his own.

The result is a set of dreamlike relationships between unrelated people in unrelated times and spaces.

“The relationships in my series might be fictitious,” says Lau. “But I think the feeling that’s created is real.”

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Mapping relationships

As the show suggests, family photos aren’t just impartial records of people. We are drawn to these images because they’re stand-ins for our memories and maps of our relationships. They are a declaration: Here are four edges of a frame; the people within this rectangle are a family. 

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The show’s curators set out to challenge this notion and it’s why many of the works are a deliberate spin on the genre.

“We wanted to have an open attitude — does a family just have to mean a mom, a dad, sons, daughters, and grandparents?” co-curator Bobby Sham tells CNN.

One series, by Frankie Chan, pictures human families from a pet’s point of view. Photographer-turned-monk Chang Lin turns his lens on leaves, flowers, and trees, suggesting that some of the purest familial relationships can be discovered in nature.

Joe Lau documents the objects within Hong Kong’s single-person households – maybe a lone saucer, an ashtray, and a bottle of beer can be a kind of family, too.

Stages of life

But family photos don’t just describe relationships, they can create relationships too. In one of the show’s most moving projects, photographer Dick Lau approached bedridden elderly patients – some terminally ill – and asked them where they would go if they could return to the outside world.

One man said his sweetest memories were walking through Hong Kong’s Ocean Park with his wife — he wished he could spend one last afternoon there. Another, a former public minibus driver, said he just wanted to take his family for a final ride.

In response, Lau printed out life-size photo backdrops and staged photoshoots with the patients and their families within the hospital walls – materializing a future that would almost certainly never come true. The photoshoots helped the patients find peace, said Lau. 

“They are in the last stages of life. The only thing that matters to them: How much more time they can have with their family.”

Truth in pictures

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While the artists’ works use metaphors to take viewers backward and forward in time, they’re really about the time we have right now – with the people we love most, according to the curators.

“The hidden context is the present,” says Sham. “We just want people to come here and think about their own lives.”

Indeed, it’s impossible not to think about your own family while looking at the images. It’s reflective of the medium’s suggestive power – a photograph almost never gives you the whole truth, but leaves you space to feel and remember.

And each family photograph seems to say one thing over and over: I was here, and this is how I loved.

“1000 Families,” curated by Blues Wong and Bobby Sham, is on view through September 4, 2016 as part of the Hong Kong International Photo Festival at ArtisTree, 1/F Taikoo Place, Cornwall House, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. For more information, visit HKIPF.