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Gillian Rose Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010, 158pp. £50 hardback.
There has long been a need for a substantial ethnography of family photography and Gillian Rose's book goes some way towards providing it. Historical and ?ieoretical studies of the vast realm of photographs outside of the canon of art history remain few and far between and all too frequently proceed without an adequate empirical base. In a very recent overview of the area, Stephen Bull rightly describes family photography as 'undertheorised', ' while in James Elkins's Photography Theory Diarmuid Costello admits, 'Whenever we talk about photography outside of the art historical frame of reference, it's as if the conversation just dies. We don't know what to say or how to proceed'.2
Amateur photography, especially in its domestic manifestation in the family album, has long been characterised, Rose notes, as trite, banal, stultified and stereotyped in subject matter. Rose, a cultural geographer, argues that almost all the literature on family photographs has concentrated on the semiotic content of what family photographs picture, rather than thinking of such photographs as objects with which a complex array...