Re-visioning the Family: Diaries of Home at The Modern

Nancy Zastudil·
Dallas/Ft WorthVisual Art
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We’ve heard it before: The camera doesn’t lie. But photography’s depiction of reality is a bit more nuanced. In fact, one of the camera’s greatest strengths is convincing us that what we see is true.

“Photography feels real and truthful to viewers, but it’s just as biased and staged as anything else can be,” says Andrea Karnes, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Karnes, together with the museum’s Assistant Curator Clare Milliken, organized Diaries of Home, on view Nov. 17, 2024 through Feb. 2, 2025 at The Modern, with select works by a multi-generational group of artists: Patty Chang, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Nan Goldin, Debbie Grossman, Letitia Huckaby, Deana Lawson, Laura Letinsky, Sally Mann, Arlene Mejorado, Laurie Simmons, and Carrie Mae Weems.

These twelve women and nonbinary artists use a range of photographic processes to examine and challenge domestic spheres, which are often relegated to the confines of what is considered feminine. Diaries of Home pushes against those confines and shows how ideas of family are changing . . . and how they have always existed, beyond what mainstream society may or may not recognize.

“It’s a broad concept about the ways the family structure in the United States has morphed over time but how it’s also stayed the same, asking questions like: What does family look like from the mid-twentieth century to now? And looking at this concept through the lens of photography, especially works by women artists because they are some of the strongest voices in photography since the 1960s addressing the notion of family and how it can be constructed,” explains Karnes.

She goes on to say that the works in the exhibition play with the idea of documentary photography, including work by artists whose practices are conceptual, some bordering on the theatrical.

For example, in her series My Pie Town, Debbie Grossman plays with time and gendered expectations by digitally reworking Russell Lee’s historical photographs, which he originally created as part of the United States Farm Security Administration. In Grossman’s parallel world, the town is populated exclusively by women. With Flint is Family, LaToya Ruby Frazier catalogs the clean water crisis in Flint, Michigan, through a matrilineal lens: local school bus driver and poet Shea Cobb, her daughter Zion, and her mother Renée.

Laura Letinsky portrays food that has been prepared, consumed, and discarded—a similar tension is present in her melancholic figurative works and “empty” interior architectural images. Whether staged or happenstance, the photos are ripe with nostalgia and longing.

Sally Mann’s black-and-white uncontextualized family pictures trigger questions and concerns that perhaps say more about the viewer than the subject. Damaged Child (1984), depicts a child with a black eye; The New Mothers (1989) portrays two young girls in dresses, one holding a cigarette and both showing attitude while carting around baby dolls.

Karnes also emphasizes that an artist’s lens-based practice can provide access to viewers in a different way than other media. For example, Arlene Mejorado allows us to peer into the entangled relationships of bodies and places, such as in Living Room Dancing (2021), an inkjet print depicting a photographic banner affixed to the rear exterior of Mejorado’s uncle’s house, bits of backyard grounding the composition. The banner depicts a 1995 New Year’s Eve party when the artist, as a kid with other young family members, danced in the living room. Carrie Mae Weems’s shutter snaps as an intimate fictional drama unfolds at a kitchen table, and Jess T. Dugan invites us into the tender spaces of relationships—with ourselves and those we love.

“The works included here call up questions of gender and how our identity is shaped by and defined within the language of Western archetypes,” says Karnes. “Many of the artists in Diaries push against such confining male and female roles, and even family roles. But it is also about including intriguing images that have a lot to say about new models of family today, which is different from a model family fifty years ago, or even twenty years ago.”

—NANCY ZASTUDIL

Nancy Zastudil

Nancy Zastudil is an editor and curator working toward equitable representation in and access to the arts.