The Family Analog

The Family Analog (2007 – present) is a growing archive of found, orphan, family photography from the late 1960s through the mid 1990s. A critical mass of images (an initial data set of 1000) from this period are being digitized, tagged and added to a database to allow for a nonlinear viewing of the personal lives of the middle class through contemporary processes of searching, sorting and filtering. Through viewing and comparison of these crowd-sourced images a portrait of America emerges that is both analytical and uncanny, exploring the family and its practices in all its diversity and mundane splendor. The archive is currently housed in a WordPress site.

The Family Analog was presented with a paper, “Borrowing and Organizing the Many,” on the Family Resemblances, Personal Archives panel at Visible Evidence 18, a documentary studies conference held at NYU in New York City in 2011. The paper outlined my process of working out a cataloging system, traced some late 20th century theory on photographic archives and grazed some more recent projects and theory around instantaneous online archives and image commons, contemporary “system(s) of accumulation, historicity and disappearance…,” the uncanny, semantic categorization and folksonomies, the perils of Google… You can read it here.