Abstract

The family photograph represents the past in a restrictively visual, static manner. Despite this, the photographic image is often relied upon to remember our past for us, and hence given an authority to represent lived experience. Further, the image is able to captivate the viewer into a search for the essence of the individual locked within it. Roland Barthes attributes this phenomenon to the noeme of photography: the "That-Has-Been". Despite the fact that the past cannot be physically captured, it has in some strange sense been accomplished in the image. In an instant, the body has been engraved through light into the paper's surface, creating what Barthes terms an "umbilical cord" between the viewer of the image and the person within it. It is through an examination of this premise that this thesis presents the work of Wyn Geleynse, Mindy Yan Miller and Yvonne Singer. Three installations that incorporate images from the artists' archives are employed as windows through which a discussion on the nature of the family photograph is expounded. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)