Familial Photos

Sumit Sute shares few pages from his visual diary about his relationship with his parents.

Sumit Sute
Nov 2 · 3 min read

“Please come here, Rinku. Go wash your hands. Let’s eat Imrati and Dhokla. They gave plenty of chilies with it. Keep that (phone) aside, why do you keep taking pictures? Who sees the personal pictures? Take this. Eat it. Let that be.” My mother asks me to share the sweets on her plate as she disregards my preoccupation with taking random pictures of our familial experiences in the house.

Photographing my parents has been a private experience for me. It has helped me feel my vision consciously. That experience has allowed a serendipitous exchange between the act of taking their photographs and the act of reflecting on my vision. The photographs had helped me bridge the way my parents behave around me and the way I see them. Initially, I started taking their pictures with an intention to record my mother’s recovery from schizophrenia and my father’s recovery from long term depression. Although, the act of photographing them has mostly been helping me to visually articulate and re-establish the emotional intimacy in my relationship with them.

My parents don’t share similar relationship with photography. Beyond looking at it as a risky and avoidable career choice of their only offspring, they don’t share anything personal with documentary photography. They routinely express their anxiety about my career choice, which in turn also induces my personal anxiety about economic sustainability. As an eldest son of a landless dalit in Vidarbha, my father secured upper mobility as graduated lower middle class government employee in Marathwada. He is also now a father to son with an elite higher education and yet without any conventional and active earning sources. My mother, who was asked to leave college to get married to my father, has closely seen educated men of her generation sit jobless as they failed to find employment in time. The inability to be always mindful of anxieties and to express verbally and communicate the feelings has always had a crippling effect on our familial environment.

As we are healing through generational and familial traumas together, I personally find the intentional and specific act of making a family portrait very burdening. Given the intimacy I lately lacked in my relationship with my parents, I am often scared of ending up making an awkward image without any candidness in it. Yet more than the grand image of togetherness itself, I am more hopeful and curious about the inclusive act of looking at the family pictures together. The essence of family albums and healing potential in the physical images will help the communication and intimacy within my family. For me, the ultimate aim of the engagement with photography is to heal and beget self compassion. Taking my parents beyond the straightness and festivity in the making of conventional family portrait, I wish to share the wider possibilities with candidness, intimacy and normalcy in engaging with family albums.

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