ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses family photography and the intervention and importance of memory. It views the family album as an important tool in the reconstruction of a personal history, searching among its cast of characters for meaning and explanations. Family photographs are quite often deployed - shown, talked about - in series: pictures get displayed one after another, their selection and ordering as meaningful as the pictures themselves. Family photographs are about memory and memories: that is, they are about stories of a past, shared by a group of people that in the moment of sharing produces itself as a family. The memories promised by the family photography industry are characterised by pleasure and held-off closure - happy beginnings, happy middles, and no endings to all the family stories.
