Photographic Procreation: Present-ness and Kinship in Family Photographs

Introduction: The Peters Colony, California oil, and white American values

Twenty years before President Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Acts and only three years after Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre made the first photograph to include a person, the Peters Colony empresario land grants were contracted in 1841 and my English-descended family was at the forefront of immigrating to yet another new country to settle the Republic of Texas. Even after that relatively short window closed and Texas joined the United States, most of the Peters Colony lay west of the frontier line, with my hometown of Fort Worth extending into Wichita Tribe territory. Scattered across Tarrant County in north Texas are the cities and towns my ancestors helped to colonize, not as founders or mayors, but as typical residents and pioneers starting anew with the empresario’s provisions of “seed, shot, and a cabin (Nichols, Mike. “Gone to Texas” and Peters Colony: “Oh, Give Me a Home . . .,” Hometown by Handlebar. February 4, 2018. http://hometownbyhandlebar.com/?p=8097).”

Neither unique nor special, the Hutchens, the Shores, the Bells, and the Baileys, make up the family lines inherited by my paternal grandfather, Darace June Hutchens, known to me as Pawpaw. Our line, which until me connects through fathers and sons, therefore registering as only “the Hutchens,” has since mostly remained in the same 20-mile radius. The colony itself, made up of a split between Americans further east but still decidedly in the south, and English businessmen, was a population of what my second cousin Larry Hutchens calls “eight-away,” meaning so small and insular that it didn’t take long to find a familial relation. White’s Chapel – conveniently named after Pastor Parson White – has held the all-white remains of many Peters Colony settlers in the White’s Chapel Cemetery, a family graveyard now run by an Association as a 501 c(13) non-profit historical property. Among the gravesites of Confederate soldiers that continue to be dressed with Confederate flags, the unmarked graves of paupers, and the site of the cemetery’s first burial for the child who died on a passing wagon train in 1852, rest family members of mine buried since 1882 and as recently as 2012. In 2002 I graduated from high school and moved to Ventura, California, to pursue an undergraduate degree, eventually becoming the first person in my paternal line to spend most of my life outside of Tarrant County since that name came to represent a place one might call home.

I came to attend college in Ventura thanks in part to the start of offshore oil drilling in California, which began in 1896 off the coast of Santa Barbara County. At the same time my dad’s family was setting down roots in north Texas, the events that would lead my mom’s family to eventually move to southern California were set in motion. The Crumps, the James, the Nolens, and the Liles were also early settlers in the Peters Colony, further northwest however, in Wichita County. My maternal grandfather, Alfred T. Crump III, known to me as Pop, grew up on a small farm in Wichita Falls, his home named for the native tribe our family came to dislocate.

By the time Pop met my maternal grandmother (Minnie Loraine Harris Crump, or Memaw), while they were working for Phillips Petroleum on the Gulf of Mexico coast in Corpus Cristi, the Texas oil boom was stabilizing. After the birth of their four children within the bounds of Texas, Memaw and Pop spent the next twenty years moving their family to Maracaibo, Venezuela; Algiers, Algeria; Tripoli, Libya; Stavanger, Norway; Darwin, Australia; Lima, Peru; and Santa Barbara, California, as Pop continued to work his way up the ranks at Phillips. Much like the insular bubbles of experience shared by American’s living on foreign military bases - or Peters colonists - my mom, her parents and three brothers, mostly lived banal and comfortable lives above the often turbulent social and political inequality of their new homes. Upon arriving in Stavanger, Mayor Arne Rettedal greeted them all, as “the six members of the Crump family were Stavanger's first oil immigrants (Kvendseth, Stig S. Giant Discovery: A History of Ekofisk through the first 20 years. Phillips Petroleum Company Norway. 1988. pg 17).”

In 1969, Pop was Phillips Drilling Superintendent in Stavanger when the first commercial North Sea oil discovery was made. That same year, the 1969 Union Oil spill of approximately 3 million gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara “gave birth to the modern environmental movement and forever changed the trajectory of oil and gas exploration in California (Mai-Duc, Christine. “The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that changed oil and gas exploration forever.” Los Angeles Times. May 20, 2015).” Five years later, Pop moved to Santa Barbara for Phillips, with Memaw and their youngest son Chris. Subsequent posts with Phillips would take Memaw and Pop to Casper, Wyoming; London, England; and Guangzhou, China, but my uncle Chris stayed in Santa Barbara, eventually marrying my aunt Pam, and raising two daughters, Casey and Alia. On a family visit to Santa Barbara my junior year of high school, Alia introduced me to Brooks Institute of Photography. It would be the only college I applied to, and I begged my parents to let me go once I was admitted.

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My interest in establishing a cursory history of my family since the invention of photography is to situate it in the larger context of American values and progression. To remind us of what is just beneath the surface when looking through images of our family from the past 118 years, and have history show us that we are both immigrants and colonizers. To remind us of the irreversible environmental toll we have taken in support of the United States’ global dominance.

Members of my family often remain unaware or uninterested in what our photographs communicate beyond sentimentality, overlooking what structures are being affirmed, and what social orders are authenticated. We live in a time that has experienced an exponential increase in the production of photographic images, including ones of family, yet the photos my family make today, although larger in quantity and more readily shared, look strikingly similar to photos of our ancestors made over a century earlier.

Scholars have critically engaged with reproduction in the family photograph via a number of entry points. Catherine Zuromskis, in Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images, establishes for us the idea of “the amateur snapshot photograph [as] the site of both banal conformity and deep affective response (Zuromskis, Catherine. “Introduction,” Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. MIT Press, 2013. pg 8),” which becomes doubly so in family photographs for their heightened link between photographer and those being photographed. Not only does their relationship exist in the present moment of a photograph being made, but backwards in time through possibly decades of shared experience, and further back through generations before their birth. My family traditions are seen as self-evident, certain language is “normal,” and life’s milestones are expected to be met by each individual member. Annette Kuhn, in Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, touches on a related weight of context, insisting the photograph as one point in a network – “In this network, the image itself figures largely as a trace, a clue: necessary, but not sufficient, to the activity of meaning making; always pointing somewhere else (Kuhn, Annette. “‘She’ll Always Be Your Little Girl...,’” Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. Verso, 2002. pg 14).”

Zuromskis and Kuhn are two of the very few who take up the task of a scholarly engagement with their own participation in such a practice or network, but do so only in the beginning pages before zooming out to include images of a more directly intended historical or cultural significance. By comparison, Roland Barthes’ seminal Camera Lucida, an inescapable text that almost all contemporary criticism around photography at the very least acknowledges, operates in this intimate fashion in its entirety. Throughout the following pages, I plan to continue in this way, following some of Barthes’ process of searching and close reading, to uncover details included below the surface of the image, but still within its frame. I will argue that more immediate unpleasant or divergent pasts are in fact sufficiently present in family photographs and family photo albums, the images quietly pointing back at themselves, and exposing nuance within the conformity.

In the case of 2017’s Thomas Fire, I have family photographs showing the discomfort and imminent threat to my family’s belongings and personal safety. My mom and my cousins Casey and Alia have shared images of fire, smoke, ash, and children wearing N95 respirators to protect their lungs. Among the personal photographs I feared would burn, are images of my family participating in – and benefitting from – the oil drilling and refining responsible for global warming. Together these photographs from our single family show a direct line from great grandfather to great granddaughter, and from financial prosperity to the California drought and boundless bone-dry tinder that would encourage the out-of-season spark from poorly maintained infrastructure for an ever-growing population.

ABOUT

Photographic Procreation: Present-ness and Kinship in Family Photographs is a project existing in three parts:

Thesis paper and Symposium

A written thesis, accessible in its entirety at SAIC's Flaxman Library, was excerpted in a Symposium presentation on Saturday, April 7, 2018, at Weinberg / Newton Gallery in Chicago, IL.

Exhibition and catalogue

New photographic artwork from the Inscriptions series was exhibited at Weinberg / Newton Gallery, Friday, April 6 through Saturday, May 5.

Family photo online database

An online database holding thousands of family photographs, collected from relatives in Texas and California, is currently being re-built.  While its organization shifts based on my own research and theorization, the images themselves are intended to be shared with my entire family.

ABSTRACT

FAMILY PHOTO SCANNING SERVICE