ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about family photographs in their domestic settings, and also about what happens when they go public in such circumstances. It explores the rich and reflexive range of things that people think, do and feel with their photos, and suggests some reasons for just why they are so popular and so significant to so many people. Rather than review all the digital technologies associated with digital photography, therefore, the book chooses to explore in depth the particular ways in which my interviewees pursue their family photography. It focuses on what a group of middle-class mums with young children do with their family photographs. The book describes family photography as a practice, rather than as a specific kind of image, by drawing on the work of a number of anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Elizabeth Edwards, Daniel Miller, Christopher Pinney and Deborah Poole.
