Family Album

Lise Melhorn-Boe is a visual artist who creates unique sculptural works in the form of books. This example, titled Family Album, pairs photographs of young girls posing nicely for the camera with texts that describe what it means to be a “good girl.” These productive pairings of text and image lay bare familial and societal expectations for young women, but they also interrogate the conventions of the family album, which usually features smiling, well-behaved faces without any mention of the discipline or pressures that occur behind the scenes of the images. 

Family Album was created in 1995, but the original photographs on which the work is based belong to an earlier moment in the history of photography, and are comparable to the snapshot albums in the exhibition. But instead of existing as precious keepsakes—as snapshots would within a typical album—here the photographs are reproduced by photocopy, a method that is quick and cheap, and that does not provide a lot of variation of tone. The appearance of the pictures on the page make them clearly readable as photocopies, bringing to mind Xerox machines and zine culture rather than treasured family heirlooms, further disrupting our expectations for the family album. The book’s handmade, cotton paper cover is bubblegum pink, offering a further sign of the codes of femininity that are examined in the album. 

Family Album is worth considering in relation to British artist Jo Spence’s work, such as Beyond the Family Album (1978-79), which calls attention to the traumas and difficulties of everyday life that are frequently elided from photographic memories. Additional examples of of Melhorn-Boe's work are featured in the Bruce Peel Special Collections online exhibition Canadian Women Artists' Books.