FAMILY FAVOURITES
WHEN Annie Leibovitz, arguably the world's leading photographer, was in London for her marvellous National Portrait Gallery retrospective a while back, she wanted to talk not about her `glam' work at Vanity Fair but about family photography. 'It was vital. I had to do that. I started with that the moment I got a camera ... I loved family groups.' It is a pity that the NPG couldn't have asked Leibovitz to do a catalogue for Assembling the Family (NPG, till 15 September).
At my family home in north Suffolk, there are wardrobes full of group snaps. I've pored over them for hours. When my mother was alive, she could just about remember who quite a few of the people in them were. Now it's all fading. But those unknown photographers display unsung talents. It's a world of Giles cartoons come to life — unknown figures in quasi-military garb, fine litters of forgotten relatives and their friends, lost now in time's tremulous mists forever.
The NPG's show is not huge, does not have a catalogue and you can enjoy it in half an hour: art you can handle. You are gripped by how random these pictures are and how vital they were to those involved.
The curators home in on two periods: early family snaps up to 1890 and contempo- rary work 100 years on. From fin de siècle cartes de visite to modern-day sequences of youngsters gradually growing up: this is art about you.
I think it was Evelyn Waugh who once said that friends were God's excuse for rela- tions. Actually, on this NPG showing, you could even like one or two of your relations.
John Henshall
Dhara Braninblatt's `Family pammana viewed as quick time VR; at the NPG
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