Fleeting Faces – A Modern Family Portrait

Throughout the nineties, during my yearly visits, I witnessed my family age incrementally. Young children change so much they were barely recognizable on my next visit. Witnessing my parents aging that way has been an unmistakable reminder of our mortality and of the limited time we have left together. When my parents visited us in the US after our child was born, I wanted to make a definitive portrait of them — the one that would always be. The large square prints of their faces bestowed a sense of permanence that ran counter to my experience.

The classic family portrait assumes everyone can be in the same place at the same time. Mine can't. My extended family is spread across Switzerland — different valleys, different lives. But it wasn't just the logistical impossibility. The gathered family in front of the house, with grandparents at the center and everyone arranged around them like a protective shield, felt like a fiction. A performance of togetherness that didn't reflect what family actually looks like in the early 21st century — or what it feels like.

So I started asking a different question: what does a portrait of a contemporary family look like when the family is never in the same place at the same time?

Feeling more and more like I had lost touch with my extended family, I decided to invite all of them to sit for me. Starting in 2008, I've photographed members of my extended family individually every four years. The resulting archive is the raw material for new ways of constructing a family portrait — ways that reflect the actual dispersed, time-shifted reality of how we exist in relation to each other.

The portraits below show the combined faces of family members on my mother's side and my father's side, each with a family tree indicating members present at the shoot. A visualization of how genetic traits meander through the family tree is forthcoming.

Fleeting faces – A modern family portrait

The notion of family has evolved from large tribal affiliations of nomadic times into the large family with three generations living comfortably under one roof to the present-day small nuclear family of two parents and their offspring. Today, even this unit is often living in single-parent homes.

Given this fragmentation within contemporary families, which includes my own family, I found the classic approach to family portraiture impossible from a practical standpoint but also completely inadequate as a truthful representation of my family.

In traditional family portraits, all family members gather in one place and arrange themselves with the help of the photographer in a way that reflects their particular family structure. Grandparents are almost always seated in the center, with everyone else surrounding them like a protective shield. Importance, reverence, and relationships are coded into the arrangement for family members to decipher even decades later.

With this project, I asked myself whether it is possible to create a portrait of the contemporary family that better represents the splintered reality of the early 21st-century family.

Starting in 2008, I've photographed members of my extended family individually every four years. The resulting portraits are the raw material for experimental ways of creating family portraits.