A Wife / My Wife

How to profit socially and photographically by having a photogenic family


a) The situation decides ...


Amateur photographers always have used and ‘misused’ family members as models. Mostly the family falls in with the session, especially when you are talking traditional documentation of festive days and hoidays:


* Here we are at the Piazza del Campo in Siena, drinking white wine

* Great-grandmother and great-grandfather’s golden wedding

* Berthram showing his new car

* The view from Empire State Building

* Gwendolyn six months pregnant

* Peter, the newly fledged graduate

* Melissa pumping up the airbed

* Standing near the Huaynaputina crater

* Diana has pups

* Sebastian and Naomi

* Benjamin’s first swimming stroke

* Uncle Niels and his scooter

* Nina and the tallest seqouia in the world

* Gabriella scorching along in a speedboat, Sicily 


The amateur photographer simply is expected to photograph situations like these. And we are pleased to do it.


On the other hand you find more or less ordinary events, that are not immortalized nearly as often. For example you hardly ever find photo albums showing:


* Martin hitting Jane with a lego car

* Gustav tumbling off his bicycle

* Coco biting Molly

* Uncle Angelos wearing his electronic tag

* Ahmad, dying of cancer


In other words, the traditional photo albums have a tendendcy to portray the cheerful and happy moments. A phenomenon, that to a large extent is to be found on Facebook, where false idealization and reality distortion have a splendid time.

However, that’s another story, that we will postpone for some other time. 


b) The photographer decides ...


The book concentrates on the shots, where the amateur photographer on his own initiative and without the build in legitimacy of the obvious and traditional photo situations, asks the family members to act as models.


Through the years many of the same scenaries will appear again and again: Portraits, group pictures, the family acting as foreground / background for landscape photographs etc.  


A great many amateur photographers have lots of really good photographs lying around. Unfortunately, the photographs are often to be found on different physical locations, distributed among several albums, furthermore some photos are in the form of slides, some as digital files. Therefore the photos are rarely seen together, at the same time.


And it is exactly this point, that the small collection of eBooks “The Family as Model” (“A Wife/My Wife”, “A Son/My Son”, “Family Portraits/My Family’s Portraits” and others) deals with.