(Not Only) Family Albums

Abstract

Every photo album has its own unique character, and reflecting on family albums allows us to rediscover their significance for culture, for family members, and for the individual. Faded, fragmented, or blurred photographs reveal a simultaneous process of fusion (coincidences) and disintegration (de-coincidences), capturing the continuous “noiseless” transformations of human life.
These reflections do not aim to formulate yet another theory on the role of family albums or photographic memory. Rather, they invite us to consider the themes of transience and disap-pearance, resumption and recurrence – whether in a personal dimension (processing of grief, as discussed by R. Barthes in Światło obrazu [Camera Lucida] and by T. Różewicz in Matka odchodzi [Mother Departs]), in familial dimension (traces of existence preserved in photo albums, a motif explored in the TV series Dom [Home]), or in individual meditations on duration and impermanence (e.g., J. Janczewska’s photographs taken by S. I. Witkiewicz).
Photographs from family albums or private collections enable us to process grief and guide us from an internal “rupture” to what François Jullien calls a gradual “clearing of pain” after the loss of a loved one.