cover image Flesh and Blood: Photographers' Images of Their Own Families

Flesh and Blood: Photographers' Images of Their Own Families

Alice Rose George, Ethan Hoffman. Picture Project, $50 (190pp) ISBN 978-0-9632551-0-5

With self-conscious invasiveness, 66 expert photographers, including Annie Liebowitz, Tony Mendoza, Mary Ellen Mark and Joel Meyerowitz, focus on their parents, siblings, spouses and children in this unsettling, often arch and excessively postured composite family album. Nudity and specialty arrangements abound, as in Patrick Zachmann's shot of a pregnant woman lying in a bathtub, a cartoon embryo drawn on her belly. David Hockney's assemblage The Scrabble Game and Carrie M. Weems's unstudied views of her sisters possess an authority and verve less convincingly demonstrated in many other, artfully posed and cropped, contributions. While Grundberg, chief curator of the Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, suggests the photographers are ``honest with their feelings and free with their medium,'' there remains an exploitative quality to many of these shots--in color or black-and-white--that undermines their authenticity and emotionality. Accompanying commentary by some photographers often provides valuable context. (Nov.)