Emily Schiffer

Photographer
   
kin
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Nationality: USA
Biography: Whether merging photography and sculpture, working on decade-long photo documentaries, doing commercial photography, or collaborating on community-based projects, I actively engage the issues and ideas at stake in our visual culture. I enjoy... MORE
Editors Only Story
kin
Copyright Emily Schiffer 2024
Date of Work Mar 2012 - Ongoing
Updated Apr 2017
Topics Kin

In 2012, my father in-law's Daniel's stage IV cancer diagnosis overlapped with news that I was pregnant. Losing him while becoming a parent raised questions about how histories are passed between generations. My father in-law survived the Maquis (the violent civil war preceding Cameroon's independence from France). My parents grew up in homes where family dysfunction threatened their physical and emotional safety. Though our resilient parents raised us in safety and love, a heaviness and vulnerability were palpable in both families. I'm fascinated by the impossible task of unraveling how these histories shape our lives. This ongoing project gathers the remnants of my family's experiences, and visualizes our silences and narratives intertwined. I'm exploring how our needs and expectations are met and missed, and how birth, death, and all the struggles and triumphs in between impact us as individuals and as a family.

I'm interested in the space between what we see and what we feel, and how stories can grow out of the space between images. I think a lot about the role photographs play in what is remembered and forgotten, personally and socially. Within the context of family history, the gaps between moments are as important as an image's content.

As a photographer, making images of my family comes easily to me, but sharing them doesn't. I'm lifting a veil, and allowing others to peer into my most intimate world. In photography and life in general, I am guided by my belief that sometimes connection is fast and deep and effortless. That sometimes connection can strip divisiveness off race and class and gender, transforming them into details that shape how we experience the world instead of categories of separation. I believe that sometimes, often even, love can be simple and easy. But sometimes "in life, and in the releasing of art into the world" the social weight of race and class and gender can crush effortless love. I do not believe that love conquers all. Instead I think that it is fragile.

Photography"documentary photography in particular" is problematic because too many viewers forget that an image is just a fraction of a second from a specific angle. It's easier to simplify and categorize people than to know them, and photography perpetuates this ease. It's a risky gesture to deliver work about one's loved ones into a segregated world. If you are white and your loved one's are not, it's easy to let viewers' eyes establish boundaries you don't feel. It's possible to acknowledge the complexities of histories and identities and families without jamming them into simplified or ill-fitting stereotypes. But I'm not sure I know how to do this outside my warm little world. I photograph people I know and love. But I worry that the sadness and heaviness that's present in all my work will objectify the people in my images. Can you photograph an unsmiling person of color (especially in black and white) without contributing to the canon of oppression? As I delved deeper into this work, questions began emerging about race and representation and family.  Does the act of sharing images of my family make it important that my husband Thierry is black and I am white? Do race and class touch our Jewish-Italian-Cameroonian family in ways others see and we don't feel?  Is it important that many of my husband's cousins in Cameroon are poor? Would it be easier to only show photographs white people? Is it possible to photograph an experience and have some one else get it just by looking? Is it important that the art-going audience "who for the most part lives in segregation"understands my point of view? Our private world does, however, remain tethered to a racialized outer context, and I struggle with whether it's worth it to make ourselves vulnerable to an outside gaze. Ultimately my will to share is stronger than my impulse to protect because I think everyone can learn about themselves by looking, and hopefully others can see their lives reflected in ours.

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