Home Press Photo

In today's post I would like to follow up on the theme from my previous post, where I wrote about finding interesting subjects for photography projects in the neighbourhood.

Once I found out that it is documentary photography that I wanted to pursue, I started learning the craft by studying the greats. Magnum Stories and Magnum Magnum were my personal Photography Bible Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. for many years. I considered photography essay as a sort of a definite achievement in photography. Every year I would go to the World Press Photo exhibition and focus on the great stories presented there. What often struck me was that these first page topics of war, poverty, climate change, illness, suffering, etc. were shown in a very intimate manner, focusing on specific people, families, or communities. This humanist approach made these stories more relatable and more real. Of course, I wanted to make photos just as important and just as good.

As photographers, we often look for the "serious" topics to work on on the outside of our private life. Family photography is often relegated to these snapshots of important events, happy faces, kids on the playground. These are of course very important, I am not debating that, but somehow with family photos it is easy to loose the grasp of the big picture, which is that this may actually be the biggest story we ever have to tell.

Realistically speaking, only a fraction of us photographers will have a chance to cover these headliner topics, publish photo stories in magazines (is this still a thing even?), try to make change with our photography. So why not photograph our families with the same audacity? Why not work on stories based on the lives and the everyday of those close to us? Let's change the approach we often have, and make these photos as if we were on an assignment, as if these were to be shown to the world, even if they will only live in a family album.

Having this mindset, of looking for concise stories to be told with a humanist approach, I started applying it to my personal, family photography.

Working this way, you will immediately find out that there is so much more to photograph at home. Also, as a family member you can be that "fly on the wall" without much effort. No need to gain trust of your subjects, no need to become part of a remote community, no need to spend three months researching the subject. You can practice the skills of an embedded photographer at home.

When I started photographing my family this way, they were a bit surprised at first, because I was making pictures of things and events everyone deemed “mundane” or "unworthy". But after a short time they stopped bothering, and I could photograph what I wanted (They probably thought, let the freak be).

Years passed, I continued photographing these seemingly random things, and one day I decided to make something with these photos. I finally sat to make the long overdue family photo album. The selection and sequencing was tough, but I managed to cram 15 years of our shared history into a few hundred photos. There are of course your typical birthdays, parties, family events, etc. But I also made a couple of spreads with these stories that I was working on. The in-between I was photographing, those private assignments.

I gave this album to my wife on her 40th birthday. The response of the entire family was, frankly, positively overwhelming. "When did you take these photos?" was the most common question, haha. Whenever we have guests from the family, often the first thing they want to do is to browse that album. I think it is because everyone realised that ultimately my photography is not about me having fun (which is also true), but primarily about them.

The photos I am showing here are from one of such mini projects. This one is about my In-laws, and I titled it Family Business. It was completed in 2009-2011. I think the story works not only on the family level for the people in the photos, but also universally, as a story of hard work and life on a farm.

Till the next one!

Jakub