Keep it in the Family

What Does Family Mean Today? 

September 14 - October 5, 2022

The Photographic Gallery began its Fall 2022 program with the Keep it in the Family exhibition showcasing students' work from the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The photography exhibition is made up of visual stories that look at the idea of family life from different perspectives. The project's work has been made as part of the Photography Foundations course where students are invited to work on a family-themed project. Professors Ronnie Close, Nadia Mounier and Ahmed Husseiny guide students through the process as these young photographers reflect on their personal lives and experiences through the camera to ask what the family means to them. This course project sets out to ask what the family means today and how it is defined in the 21st century. Developments in technology mean that we share our family's memories and moments in an instant as the social media image has become a phenomenon of everyday life. This student exhibition covers the contemporary family in a breadth of situations through creative approaches by the young photographers who share ideas of belonging, kinship and absence, to open a window onto how the family is, in a way, a cultural construct. These visual stories reveal how photography can be a means for creating new images of family and a family of images that sheds light on this universal subject to rethink our place within the family condition. Imaginative and intimate photographic perspectives have been used by these young photographers to provide an insight into current photographic practice. Approaches overlap in curious ways as family photos are restaged, cameras look at social challenges and family trees are explored to push the limits of photo-documentary reality.

Curated by

• Dina ElDeeb, curator, The Photographic Gallery
• Ronnie Close, associate professor, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Nadia Mounier
• Ahmed Husseiny