Five photo books about family

It is probably the most universal gesture in the world, but it is also the one in which each of us finds his or her own declination of affection and the most distinctly personal feelings. The greeting, that so humanly childish way of saying hello, goodbye or farewell, is also one of the most undervalued codes among those that define human activities, perhaps precisely because of its status of apparent simplicity and substantial instinctiveness. For 23 years, American photographer Deanna Dikeman took a photo of her parents every time she left their home in Sioux City after a visit. Each of these photos invariably shows a sign of greeting, whatever the weather, the time or day of the year. What began almost casually in 1991 as part of the broader Relative Moments series, gradually became a ritual, through whose iconographic account, however, the whole sense of the relationship between the artist and his parents passes silently and lightly. The black and white is followed by colour, over time characters are added and others disappear, then a single mother remains, who continues undaunted to greet from the door of the old people's home, and in the end there is only an empty driveway, the beloved place of an absence that is now unbridgeable.

Can you make a narrative for all intents and purposes without writing or uttering a word? Gus Powell's latest book proves that this is not only possible but also powerful and poetic. Layered like a real novel, Family Car Trouble has at least two protagonists: on the one hand, the artist's father, who is ill and ever closer to the moment of farewell; on the other, the Volvo station wagon that has accompanied Powell and his family for years and is in constant need of maintenance. In between are a man, a woman and their two children who, although the real fulcrum of the story, remain in an expressive and conceptual limbo that allows them to mirror events and interact with the other two characters. How long will it be possible, or make sense, to doggedly try to repair that car? How far will resistance and resilience be the unwritten words of this evocative narrative? In the metaphor that exists between mechanical repair and medical care, and in the relationship between lives that grow and lives that fade away, one of the most beautiful books of recent years is played out. And, without special effects but with only the basic tools of selection and sequence—at once surprising and perfect—it incidentally tells us what photographic publishing can and must be able to do today.

Right from the cover of MOM we know we are dealing with a multifaceted personality, a multiple and mutable entity whose deliberately fragmented image defies definition and labeling. What we are about to leaf through, however, is not only an account of a way of being and living, but also and indeed a work of construction and collaboration, the intense dialogue of a mother with her son, an artist and queer, who demands, claims and obtains something that is very difficult to achieve: not only privileged but also complete access. The result of a mutual trust built up over the years through a family biography free of preconceptions, the proteiform series of photographs that make up MOM was created in 2009 and has now seen its first editorial form. The iconographic modes explored are many, and recall fashion and performance, staging and portraiture, Flemish masters and Japanese manga, video art and cosplaying, Antonioni and von Trier, Bowie and Björk, Viviane Sassen and Cindy Sherman, Juergen Teller and Andy Warhol. But what emerges in a more subtle and decisive way as one delves into this dense, both obsessive and  therapeutic narrative, is a continuous personal work that allows both Charlie Engman and Katleen McCain Engman to become other than themselves and paradoxically more and more themselves, up to something that lives well outside and beyond the form of the book and the photographic project.

Raymond Meeks has long accustomed us to the possibility, decidedly even if not exclusively photographic, of passing between one realm and another, of crossing the threshold that exists, albeit invisibly, between the sensible world and the inner one, where the mysterious way in which we perceive that same world lies. With Somersault the passage is perhaps less audacious, at least from a strictly conceptual point of view, but it becomes, on the other hand, more arduous and substantial, not only and not so much because it represents one of the many moments that make up the repeated attempt to enter the world of a daughter, but also and above all because it is Abigail Meeks herself who finds herself facing a threshold, that between one of the many possible versions of adolescence and one of the many possible declinations of adulthood. One step away from college, just before leaving home, what had been one of the many possible forms of a daughter gives her father the chance to tell her story at this delicate moment of transition. It is a conversation in which portraits alternate with familiar landscapes, where details of a romantically indifferent nature intertwine with those of a body—and a personality—in constant flux.

The Model Family is Tealia Ellis Ritter's first monograph, but the intriguing series of images that comprise it began in 1989, when the American artist was less than a teenager and her father gave her an analogue camera. The first thing that strikes us on leafing through the book is the contrast between its content and the adjective that, albeit typographically minimal, qualifies the family whose representation we are looking at. But the confusion is only momentary: the fact that the author uses the formula "model family" certainly does not mean that her family—portrayed for so many years, with so much attention and affection, but also without discounts—is the same as the one we would all like to have or should have, but only that it is a model, a term that indicates "any real object that the artist proposes to portray". The question then shifts to another semantic plane: not so much what, but how. Motherhood, childhood, death, adolescence, old age, conformity, nonconformity, banality, beauty, illness, everyday life, everything, however common or special, is filtered through a gaze that is both loving and merciless, and that succeeds in the difficult task of seeing life as something perturbing, that happens to ourselves and at the same time to someone else. (The Model Family by Tealia Ellis Ritter is published by Loose Joints).