The Optics Of Kinship: Reframing Family Photography In U.S. History
Instructed by Virginia Thomas at Rice University
PREVIOUS: Creating Children’s Media
Instructed by Dr. Julie Dobrow at Tufts University
The Optics Of Kinship: Reframing Family Photography In U.S. History
School: Rice University
Course: The Optics of Kinship:
Instructor: Virginia Thomas
Course Description:
This course will look at the history of photography as a powerful force in constructing the politics of family in the US. By looking at photographs from history, art, and our own families, students will learn how photography shaped not just familial norms, but race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging.
Ask the Instructor: Virginia Thomas
What originally inspired you to design The Optics of Kinship?
I’m really interested in the ways that relationships are portrayed through photographs; I think that it’s really important to examine the concept of the traditional, ‘nuclear’ family that we see so often portrayed in white America, as doing so helps us to better understand the systems of oppression at work. So, I wanted to create a class where students have the opportunity to step away from their home environment and examine their relationship to others, through photography.
In my dissertation I examined the relationship between white family photography and lynching photography, and anti-black photography as a measure of anti-black violence. That meant a lot of thinking about how white family photography is can actually be seen as reproducing racial violence. I was a graduate of the American Studies department at Brown University, and that’s a department where we think a lot about race, gender, and sexuality in many different forms and iterations. So I really wanted to bring those elements of my knowledge into the classroom as well.
What kind of images do you examine in class?
We look at a variety of different kinds of family photography, particularly at the emergence of family photography around the turn of the 20th century. At this time, family photography was quite severe — stark lighting, very posed, and always structured in such a way that discloses the family’s internal hierarchy. Then we move on through the 20th century, examining the ways that artists played with ideas of domesticity within the home and challenged traditional hierarchies through more modern photography techniques. One artist whose work we look at in-depth is Pauli Murray, a Black activist and artist who worked extensively with collages and family trees to challenge notions of imperialism and colonialism in the 1940s.
We expand on those topics through class readings. One reading that students really enjoyed was ‘Marking Time’ by Nicole Fleetwood, which explores the impact of family photography upon incarcerated individuals. Students were really interested in how photography can be used to create a kind-of “alternative space” within a prison.
The pandemic has obviously been a major topic of discussion throughout the term. During one class, I showed images of soldiers returning to Rhode Island from fighting abroad in World War I. Because their return coincided with the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, they were all held in quarantine at a base in Newport; in these photos, you can see that a lot of them are wearing masks and trying to keep some distance from one another. It’s interesting, because these images are over a hundred years old, but still so relatable to what we’re experiencing today.
In addition to discussing historical photos and their contexts, I have the students bring in their own family’s photos for in-class analysis.
It sounds like the course is very interdisciplinary — which department is it offered within?
I’m a Post-Doc within the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality — so that is the department which offers Optics of Kinship.
How long did it take you to design the class’ content and syllabus?
The class was originally meant to be a writing-intensive seminar for first year students. Beyond the writing component of the class, I was able to design the course’s content completely on my own. One of the nice things about teaching at Rice is that they have a really great Center for Teaching Excellence, who I worked closely with to ensure that the assignments made sense and that the reading load was appropriate.
I would say that it took me a couple of months just to kind of put all of my readings and materials together — but really, it took much longer than that. So much of the class is based on my research and learnings, which obviously took years of studying to amass. So designing the syllabus took, probably, two or three months? But understanding the content — that’s been a lifetime of acquisition.
What is the one thing you want your students to leave Optics of Kinship having learned?
It would be: the power and importance of collective work. Work that builds and relies on multiple researchers and experiences, in a way that all stakeholders rise together rather than the rise of the ‘heroic individual’, is more culturally critical and representative than work which supports a single perspective. •
