As an archive the family photo album works against its own purported logic: its narrative carefully orchestrated through a lifetime of editorial interventions to convey a happy, perhaps fictive family history. With luck, memory falters and the album's seductive certainty remains. Bitter disputes are forgotten and the smiling Kodachrome faces persuade the album's reader of the familial conviviality of a thousand weddings and barbeques. Revisionism is rare. Doubts persist and the secret history of a family's sadness seems always to be embedded right there in the surface of the snapshot.
Much of Michele Jaquis' recent re-photographed work aspires to render the complex and contradictory operations of this kind of archive visible. Jaquis looks into her family's photographic history to reveal a false imaginary: photographs doing their damnedest to suppress the uncomfortable truths of an unhappy marriage, unreconciled squabbles, and religious intolerance. Resisting the mythic project of the family album, Jaquis provides us with texts which make public the private contradictions latent in these photographs. As such, the artist does indeed complicate these pictures' surfaces. But I wonder whether Jaquis doesn't rob such images of their most compelling characteristic, even of their essential function -- ambivalence.
I saw her work in LA in a show and thought it was the most interesting use of the family album type of work. The large scale of the photographs effectively create this wierd, uncomfortable intimacy. Also, I thought the dad looked like Donald Sutherland, kinda, which is always a plus!
