Belonging Is Found In Family Photos

‘Kindred Spirit’ a new photo exhibit distills our relationships helping us to see whats closest and most important

by JT Peters

EVERYONE has a family-member who assumes the mantle of “the photographer.” There’s the overzealous dad who creeps down the center aisle at his kid’s piano recital just so he can grab that shot of them plunking their way through a Chopin nocturne, and the mom insistent on snapping family portraits at every stage of the annual Disneyland vacation. There’s also the cousin with the Nikon DSLR perpetually hanging from their neck at the ready for that perfect grayscale moment.

But it’s not often that we consider how career photographers and dedicated artists capture their own loved ones. The exhibition Kindred: Photographers Focus on Family (Feb3 — Apr 2) at SOCO Gallery in Charlotte, gives us a powerful look at familial love and all its complications through the eyes of six great photographers.

‘Jesse Bites’ 1985. Photo: Sally Mann.

Guest-curated by Brad Thomas, former Director of Exhibitions at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Kindred includes the work of Carolyn DeMeritt, Raymond Grubb, Linda Foard Roberts, Sally Mann, David Hilliard and Brittany Little. Locals DeMeritt, Grubb, Roberts and Little represent Charlotte while Mann and Hilliard hark from beyond the city’s limits. Each play a key role in Kindred’s extremely personal composition. Mann — a celebrated photographer, poet, writer and filmmaker notably published in Time magazine in the early ‘90s — brings selections from her expansive body of work on her own family, titled simply “Family Pictures.” Mann’s work addresses time, place and the perspective of innocence found in children, especially during extremely intimate, humanizing moments.

Photo: David Hilliard. From the series ‘The Tale Is True’

Hilliard also has a long track record of capturing his family on film, having participated in similar exhibitions across the United States on the topic of family, and drawing from a collection of works entitled The Tale is True. In this body of work, Hilliard attempts to break down the idea of the family unit visually, often in triptych, addressing his own relationships and particularly his relationship with his father.

“She was strong enough at 25 to divorce, a stigma in the late 1940s. She was a feminist before she even knew the word. She’s a model of self-reliance and independence that inspired me to step outside the bounds.” Photo: Carolyn DeMeritt. Courtesy: SOCO Gallery

Kindred as whole pans out delicately. The featured artists allow the public direct access to extremely personal moments captured in time. Take DeMeritt’s haunting piece, My Mother: The Year of Her Death, a quiet, blustery moment on what we assume is a beach. A soft focus and vignette leaves ours eyes wandering from a flock of seagulls taking off overhead to an elderly Mrs. DeMeritt staring out of frame.

‘9/11’ Linda Foard Roberts watched her tiny daughter sleep in front of a television on Sept. 11, 2001, as the station ran and re-ran footage of planes hitting the World Trade Center towers. “It became very clear to me how helpless I was,” she says. Photo: Linda Foard Roberts. Courtesy of SOCO Gallery

Little’s slightly more jovial contributions feature her eccentric twin brothers, candidly shot from their Charlotte residence. Like much of Kindred, these shots thrust the viewer into their subject’s lives, just skirting that awkward feeling of being an interloper.

Roberts lays claim to the most arresting moment in the show with a piece simply titled, 9/11. The subject is obvious but approached at an angle all too real for those alive during that horrific time a decade-and-a-half ago. In this silver gelatin print, a young girl takes the foreground in her best dress, overtaken by sleep and curled up on an ottoman that sits in front of a flickering television set frozen on a frame of a burning World Trade Center tower. This piece needs no real analysis, it speaks to the audience like a boot to the chest, managing to avoid the contrived feelings that often accompany artwork that addresses such tragedies.

‘Thomasville’ (2009) is a portrait made by Raymond Grubb of his partner Tom Thoune, who suffer a stroke in 2015. “I took Tom there and asked him to stand behind the tree that was blooming. You only see a little bit of his face … and that’s how he feels now: that there’s only a part of him that really shows now. He’s improved incredibly in the past year but there’s still little missing pieces,” says Grubb. “This portrait is even closer to what he feels like now, because there are some missing parts, or — not as clearly seen.” Photo: Raymond Grubb. Courtesy: SOCO Gallery

For his part, Grubb brings technicality to an exhibition dominated by intense emotional symbolism. His series of waxed platinum palladium prints are complex in both preparation and execution, and their texture and line-work deserve consideration on their own merit aside from Grubb’s skill in portraiture and composition. Technically, the printmaking process leaves his work fading into the ethereal, making the moment captured feel that much more fleeting.

Photo: Brittany Little. From the series ‘Asymmetrical’ which is an intimate look at her identical twin brothers.

Kindred takes a powerful look at innocence, family and the complexity of the emotions that come with the people we share DNA with. It asserts, both technically and conceptually, just how precious family is. From the inception of life to its end, these moments capturing those loved ones seem that much more salient, that much more intimate — and for the artists of Kindred, key to the art-making process.

This is an edited version of an article that was originally published by The Charlotte Viewpoint