cover image Family Portraits in Changing Times

Family Portraits in Changing Times

Helen Nestor. NewSage Press, $22.95 (139pp) ISBN 978-0-939165-15-5

Nestor, who began photographing nontraditional families in the 1970s, decided in 1988 to show how the traditional American family unit--breadwinner father, homemaker mother, two children--was being replaced by a variety of new arrangements. Her 30 black-and-white family portraits are an eloquent plea for tolerance, suggesting the ordinariness of love in a family with a gay father who is not married to the mother; the not-yet-resolved tension between a single mother and her grown daughter; the acceptance within a large Quaker family of several adoptees from Vietnam and Korea; and the bridge two interracial children apparently form between their white father and black mother. Most of the people photographed contribute brief descriptions of their lives. The book is sometimes confusing because Nestor's definition of the nontraditional family is so broad: readers may find that a black family in which the husband took early retirement and works at home is more ``traditional'' than a family in which both parents have cerebral palsy and use wheelchairs. Nestor could have improved the book had she addressed the relative differences in societal stress faced by her subjects. (Oct.)