Family frames

Hirsch provocatively explores the photographic conventions for constructing family relationships and discusses artistic strategies for challenging those constructions. When we capture our family photographically, we are often responding to an idealized image. Contemporary artists and writers, Hirsch shows, have exposed the gap between lived reality and a perceived ideal to witness contradictions that shape visual representations of parents and children, siblings, lovers, or extended families. Exploring fiction, "imagetexts," and photographic essays, she elucidates their subversive devices,…