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Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Generosity and the Digital Exchange of Family Photographs

Can the family photograph as digital artifact be considered as a form of ‘gift,’ from a collaborator to an artist? What cords are cut when such family photographs are moved from an album into an exhibited artwork? What ethical and political responsibilities come with this type of gift, in terms of its connection to a living subject and family memory? The primary objective of this work was to develop a critical analysis of the transition of the family photograph, from analogue to digital version. The methodology is a critical and theoretical framework drawing from photographic fieldwork, discourse analysis of the photographic album, gift theory developed from Social Anthropology, Cultural Materialism and art criticism’s application of such theories to critiques of participatory art practices. This chapter is for the forthcoming book The Photograph and the Album. The chapter addresses a key issue that emerged from the photography project 'Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place' and is itself a development from a conference paper originally presented at Family Ties: Recollection and Representation (University of London, March, 2012). The paper in turn developed from my participation as Workshop Leader, ‘Digitalized artefacts, generous gestures...’ for the seminar Connecting the Dots: Virtuality, Technology and Feminism in the Museum (Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, September 2011 for the University of Brighton’s Leverhulme Trust-funded International Research Network Transnational Perspectives on Women's art, Feminism and Curating). Therefore the context is in the field of photography, memory, cultural studies and aims to build upon seminal works (Kuhn, Spence, Langford et al) by shifting the emphasis onto an examination of something which we take entirely for granted - a digital duplicate of analogue family photograph.