Episode 021: Thy Phu
Prof. Thy Phu of Western University is an English literature scholar who studies the discursive role of photographs in society. Her exhibit of family photos at the Royal Ontario Museum asks us to reconsider our assumptions about families.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guest today is Professor Thy Phu of the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. Professor Phu is an English Literature scholar whose work focuses not on the written word but on the image. Thy, welcome to the podcast.
Thy Phu: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be part of this.
Cameron: We're recording this using Zoom and you're in London, Ontario right now?
Thy: Actually, I'm in Toronto.
Cameron: Oh, you are in Toronto? Oh, goodness, I could have had you come into the studio. So the project I want to talk to you about is the one that involves your collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum and another archive as well that is looking at the analysis, the collection, the meaning of family photographs. But before we get to talking about that particular project, I'm really interested in this fact that you've got this PhD in English and yet, you're focusing on photography. Can you tell me how you make a move like that?
Thy: Well, my journey through academia and research has been a bit circuitous as you point out. All of my degrees were in English but I've been very fortunate to go to universities and to programs that were very open to interdisciplinary research. A lot of the work that was happening in the 1990s that was starting to take account of the visual turn, what they're calling the visual turn in culture, much of it stems oddly enough within English departments. The kind of training that we have in looking at textual form provided us with a really good foundation for analyzing images, and I think it was precisely because I was outside of the traditional discipline of art history that I was able to ask questions that weren't being asked at the time about the social function of images. Initially, I started by examining the representation of images within literature. One of the narratives that really struck me, back when I was still in grad school at McMaster University, was Obasan ... You might be familiar with the Japanese-Canadian novel about the internment camp experience or actually the concentration camp experiences of Joy Kagawa ... and the figure of photographs occurs constantly within this novel and I wanted to ask what it was actually doing, not just as an aid to memory but also as a documentary source that gets misinterpreted and then just the personal images that became so meaningful for the narrator. So, I started there, and then I thought, "Well, I'll just look at the photography itself."
Cameron: Yeah, so it's taking this idea of images, something more than just a metaphor but as something that actually changes our experience of our memory and of our past.
Thy: Exactly, more than just a metaphor, more than merely a reflection or illustration of a transparent reality but densely layered and complex, and constantly evolving and shaping our relationship with ourselves and with each other.
Cameron: I know from my own work in trying to understand accounting, I'm an accounting researcher, and looking at the use of accounting as a language, I understand the postmodern turn, in that the meaning of a text -- in my case an accounting report, in your case it might be an image -- is not a function of the intention of the people who produced that text or image but it happens at the moment of consumption. So these photographs that you're looking at are an interpretation of the past by the people who made decisions about what to photograph and what to consider a valuable enough photograph to hang on to and to keep. But then there's also the interpretation that happens when we in the present day look at these photographs. So, where is your interest? Is in the selection of the photos? Is it in what happens when they're displayed to people today?
Thy: I am really taken by the recent shift that examines what one critic, Ariella Azoulay, calls the event of photography. So, it is an encounter with a photograph that is a multi-temporal component that is constantly shaping the meaning of a photograph. So where you point out the producer has perhaps a consciously intended meaning, but that's just only one contribution to the meaning of a photograph. The producer is in collaboration, whether voluntarily, whether on involuntary terms, with the person being photographed. So you think about the concentration camp photographs, there was no consent. Did they actually issue their agreement to be photographed? But nevertheless, there is a moment of uncomfortable collaboration in that moment. But I'm uncomfortable with just leaving this tension as the fixed meaning of the photograph because subsequently, marginalized communities could turn back to that and reframe it and reclaim those photographs to make meaning within their own terms. So this is why the notion of an encounter or an event is really powerful, because it opens up opportunities for people who have haven't the access to a means of representation, in order to make a space or make a past for themselves, present a history for themselves.
Cameron: So there's kind of two moments of curation in this then, there's the decision of the photographer or the family to have taken and kept the photo and then there's the moment where you gather things together for some sort of an archive or display, and each of these is an opportunity to either exclude people, right, to not have their consent when their photo is taken or to draw them into the participation. So in what ways does this project involve people participating in the collection and the display, as opposed to just the moment they took the photo?
Thy: Oh, you're talking about the Family Camera Network?
Cameron: Yeah, I'm kind of jumping around here.
Thy: Yeah.
Cameron: Because all these things you're saying, the light bulbs are going off for me, like flash bulbs of a camera and to see where does this connect with all of this?
Thy: Well, the Family Camera Network was inspired in large part by kind of a frustration with the existing state of archives when it comes to specifically family photography. So my collaborators and I, a group of women that I've been working with for a number of years who work in history, who work in art history and curation and who are artists as well, we realized that the every day materials that we look at so frequently and often take for granted, that there were a number of commonplace assumptions we have about them that we realized were being based on just a handful of materials and that the critics that we were reading were basing their analysis on their own personal family photos.
Thy: So we wanted to understand ... and in large part because we could tell the story behind their personal family photos, but if you go to a library or a museum, you look at artists and the ways that they use family photos to reimagine a social relationship or as a means of creative expression. But our understanding of family photos, the way they function, the way that they bring people together, the way that they narrate experience of estrangement, was extremely limited because the material in collections that we could find were separated from their owners and separated from their stories. So we felt that we needed to, of course, keep in the personal element of it. But one way to do that was to build our own archive, and it was an attempt to build a specifically anti-racist archive that collected family photos alongside their stories. That way there wouldn't be this detachment that was happening in a lot of the archives we were looking at.
Cameron: So you said an anti-racist element to this. So this is very specifically, trying to deal with relationships of power and society and exclusion and you are attempting to what? I want to use the expression give voice but it's a visual image that is being ...
Thy: Well, there is a voice, because we were recording oral histories ...
Cameron: Oh, okay.
Thy: ... behind the family photos, so that was what's distinctive. So a lot of the special collections that contain family photos, they featured albums that have been categorized as orphaned. So orphaned images lack provenance, like their contextual information is completely missing. We don't know who made it. We don't know who is in the photograph. We don't know the context in which those images ended up in that particular collection. What we understand of the image, we have to guess based on the formal composition of the photograph. However, with family photos, the thing is that there are highly, often repetitive visual forms. So earlier before we started this interview, you were telling me about your father's photo, posing in Calgary in front of his car at the age of 20. I would suggest that in most family albums, there is a photograph of someone posed in front of their car.
Cameron: Right.
Thy: And that speaks to a common sentiment that is expressed in family photos, which is a desire for a social aspiration. And so to portray yourself in front of a car, a house, your newest television set is a formal device. If you just look at that alone, you would think that a family album is completely materialist -- evinces a materialist desire for consumption -- which is why a generation of critics after Bourdieu in the 1960s dismissed it as a bourgeois middle-brow art. But we look at it closely to consider the nuances between those desires, especially for minoritized families who can't take for granted the right to have families, the right to be recognized as families.
Cameron: Right.
Thy: So historically, within Canada, for example, Chinese-Canadian immigrants were excluded as a consequence of these early immigration exclusion laws. And so for, say, the bachelor husbands who ended up in these ethnic conclaves, to photograph themselves in front of someone else's car was to aspire to that which they wished to have and to send the photograph back then to China, where the photographs would be cropped or remade, was to visually fantasize an image of a family that could be united despite their separation, right? So we wanted to nuance these aspirations and to think of how they vary.
Cameron: So I want to get at some of the themes of this collection, but maybe you could just describe for me how the collection comes about. So this is a project that happened starting in about 2016?
Thy: Yes.
Cameron: And you've described it as a collaborative project, so you had funding for this. How did you get the funding? When you say collaboration, how does that take place? Who's collaborating and how do you arrange all that?
Thy: That's a complicated question. Collaborative projects are a bit unusual for someone working within the discipline of English. The stereotype of us English folks is the monastic scholar who locks himself up in the carrel and comes out when the monograph is completed. But the nature of this project -- which I think as you can guess now is a bit of a mammoth undertaking, there are so many moving parts and so many people involved -- it needs to be collaborative. We had the idea first after meeting with wonderful people in the UK, Autograph Black Photography, which is an institution devoted to the exploration of the black diaspora within Britain through photography and Stuart Hall was a major figure behind that. And so they told us about one of their projects that involved vernacular photographs, specifically family, and the light bulb moment went off when a group of fellow scholars visited the UK and met with the executive director, We thought, "Wow, we could do something similar within Canada to explore some of the legacies of British Empire and the diaspora within Canada." And eventually, perhaps, we could link up with Autograph to see multiple diasporas. So that's also much larger in scope than we were able to take on at the time, so we thought we would start small and see where funding would take us. We were fortunate to receive a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant that was for three years, 2016 to 2019. But even before then, we'd received seed money from the Royal Ontario Museum, which enabled us to do a pilot project. The Royal Ontario Museum mounted a show that piloted ways of engaging the public in bringing their own family photographs and participating in their photographic sessions with an artist who was featured in that show. From there, we got a preliminary list of potential participants. Once we received the funding in 2016, we were able to move forward and oddly enough everyone has always said, "Okay, well, you need to be prepared for people not to participate in your project. That is going to be a major challenge, because family photographs are private, people don't want to give them up, they don't want to talk about it." And that is not the experience that we've had at all.
Cameron: You had a lot of success in people contributing.
Thy: We did, we did. We're very lucky in that way.
Cameron: One piece I'm missing here is your connection to the Royal Ontario Museum. How did you get a partnership with them? Were you already involved with them because of your disciplinary focus?
Thy: I'm specifically involved with them through one of their senior curators, Deepali Dewan, who is Senior Curator of South Asian Art. She and I were part of a research collective called the Toronto Photography Seminar, since 2005, actually. So we've been working together in a different capacity through these years and as somebody who is already working in the Royal Ontario Museum, she was able to both negotiate the partnership and be an active participant, one of the leading participants in the project.
Cameron: So before this project even takes place, you were already a collaborative scholar, working with others rather than sitting in your study carrel writing your monograph.
Thy: That's correct, though I still do that, too.
Cameron: [laughs] Good. There's an aspect of all of this that keeps coming out, which is this notion of migration or dislocation. You're looking at stories of people who have been dislocated either physically or culturally/socially, from their setting. So you've got migration, you've got this notion of diaspora. You also have the queer community, which is somehow dislocated from the center of our expectations of society and so they have that sense of ... maybe not physical migration but being the Other in our society. Were there any other aspects? Did you look at relationships with First Nations in photography? Is there any aspect of that?
Thy: It was a major theme in the show. It was a bit that we mounted at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2017, which was the year for ... I think it was Canada 150, so that was a very exciting year and we knew that we wanted to do this because it would be a statement, it would be a way for us to reflect on 150 years of Canadian history through the history of family photography.
Cameron: Right.
Thy: You're very perceptive. The show was specifically about photography and migration, and we were sensitive as to how we would address First Nations relationships because we did want to use that banal phrasing, "Canada is an immigrant nation."
Cameron: Exactly.
Thy: That's palpably not true and we also didn't want to collapse or to conflate these very different experiences around the dying notion that everyone who's ... People are moved or they're compelled to move for many different reasons and we're just really inspired by critical race scholars and scholars in settler-colonial studies who talk about the triangulation of race and settler-colonial capitalism, the ways in which they differentially racialize. So we did work with Jeff Thomas, an Indigenous artist, who produced a piece for the show at the Royal Ontario Museum, an exhibit there. We borrowed material from the Anthropology Museum at UBC, which featured an incredible set of photographs taken by someone who survived Indigenous school experience. So her father had bought her a little Brownie camera, which she sneaked onto the school and covertly photographed her fellow students. Our understanding of those photographs was it provided us with covert glimpses of indigenous kinships that the Indigenous school experience sought wholly to erase, to destroy.
Cameron: Yes.
Thy: So that was really meaningful for us because we're careful. We did not want to collect Indigenous materials without having Indigenous collaborators and Indigenous archivists on board. It was not the place of any of the collecting institutions that were working with us to be collecting, but on the other hand, we did not want to exclude this vital component of Canadian visual history.
Cameron: You have, I think the website says, about 17,000 photographs in the collection now?
Thy: That's correct.
Cameron: Do have a rough sense of where the bulk of those collections are coming from? Are they coming from any particular diaspora group or is it evenly spread across the entire population of the country?
Thy: I wouldn't say it's across the entire nation. This just has to do with some of the challenges of being a researcher within Canada. In the UK, they're able to do what they call The Great Family Roadshow. They can go in a camper van and drive across the UK and collect family photographs. That's an easy undertaking because it takes a couple of hours to drive across the UK. Most of the collections come from within Ontario.
Cameron: From within Ontario.
Thy: But even when you say that, people from Ontario come from across Canada and they come from across the world. That said, to be honest, some of the largest collections came from one donor. So when people love photographs, they truly love to collect and to make and to keep photographs. We were fortunate to have donations that consisted of multiple albums and in one case, the Ty Lee collection, was thousands and thousands of photographs. The matriarch of that family, was an avid amateur photographer with great skill and after she died her children wanted to keep her legacy alive and they were very keen to work with the ROM and to work with the project in order to do so.
Cameron: This collection has multiple, multiple purposes. It is an exhibit that people can go and see. It is a website that people can browse, but is also a resource for teaching, for historians. Can you tell me some of the uses to which this has been put?
Thy: Yeah, one of the challenges, I think, of anybody who's doing an archival project -- I think of us as oral historians just because we're integrating oral history as a method in this project as well -- oral historians know that they want to look at the voices of those who have been unheard. The problem sometimes is that they collect these voices and they compile these interviews and yet no one uses them. And so a major focus of this project as it turns out -- we wouldn't actively think about it at the time, but now that we've had some time to reflect it becomes clear -- we wanted to activate the archives. People are living, they participate in the project because it meant so much for them to be able to be seen by a mainstream institution and we felt it was our responsibility to ensure that an element of their vision would be realized. And so the exhibit was one way, or we actually had four exhibits over the course of the three years. Exhibition is one way to engage the public in activating the archives. The public workshops and presentations that we did was another way. The blog, the website is yet another way and the online access to the archive is yet another way. It's one way of ensuring that there is a public humanities and a community engagement component to the project, integral to it.
Cameron: When you're assembling an exhibit out of this archive, what kinds of thinking goes into the selection and the display of the photographs? You don't simply choose them at random, I take it?
Thy: No, no. Thank goodness for Deepali Dewan, the lead curator of the show at ROM and a senior curator who has many years of experience putting together enormous shows, really helped. I think that at first it was a pitch of an overarching theme and an argument we wished to make. I think about exhibits as kind of like being books, actually, just told in a different way, told visually. I think we began by talking about how we tell stories, right? I looked at literature and I was telling a critical story about how literature functions in a world. I look at images and I think, "Well, what does this image tell us about the story of the family and about migration and about how definitions with family change in relationship to the state. So in Exhibition 2, for Canada 150, we wanted to tell a story about what Canadians looked like in the past 150 years. We wanted to say something beyond, again, the cliché that Canada is an immigrant nation, which was a thesis that we wanted to refute in many ways. So it begins with consultation, pitching different themes and then thinking about how those themes related to each other. So one of those themes was the story about the evolution of technology and the handheld camera, and how that changed ways of seeing: the handheld camera being highly portable and therefore easily adapted for documenting migration. We wanted to tell the story about how the state tries to define families and to limit who gets to constitute themselves as a family. So that was one major theme and another had to do with conventions. We picked one, childhood, and another is how families place themselves within the nation. So that explains the Niagara Falls wall that we had and it was one of the most successful parts of the show. Everyone who came to the show could speak about their own Niagara Falls photograph.
Cameron: Yes.
Thy: They desire to be photographed next to a national landmark.
Cameron: So what did you do with the Niagara Falls exhibit? Did you temporalize it? Did you look at how the photographs changed over time or do you look at different aesthetic elements of the photographs?
Thy: That's a good question. What was important for us was kind of the quotidian quality of the Niagara Falls photograph. I mean there are photograph booths and studios, historically, in Niagara Falls where families can photograph themselves wearing different costumes, particularly Wild West costumes and so on. But we were more interested in, from the 19th century to the present day, yes, there was change over time, but what was most striking was the consistency, the desire to be photographed at the most desirable spot, the spot that would show that you were there, you were present in the photograph. So this is a moment of intersection between family and tourism and nation building. That was the main concern.
Cameron: I'm interested in if you ever had photographs submitted that you decided didn't belong in the category of family photographs. Did you have like a litmus test for what counts as a family photograph?
Thy: That is a really great question. I think from the outset, one of our goals was actually to challenge the definition of the family photograph, and this is where I think that we might be a little bit controversial. A family photograph is often seen as a snapshot that depicts family members together in a particular setting, right?
Cameron: Right, that's classic, yeah.
Thy: That's the common ... Classic, but as others have noticed that others have attempt a different definition. So a family photograph is anything that has a familial function, which seems almost tautological but you think about the sending of a photograph of a migrant laborer who's working in an agricultural field in Ontario, back to the family behind him. So he's not depicted with anyone else, but that to us has a familial function.
Cameron: Correct, yeah.
Thy: Or in the case of refugee families at a different era, including mine, you'd be photographed at the camp by a UNHCR person or a Red Cross worker. And that's an ID photo taken for bureaucratic purposes. It intersects ... It's sometimes called instrumental photography and it's associated with the state. We contend that that's a family photograph, too. Hon Lu's collection, the family that donated those thousands of photographs by their mother who was an avid photographer, includes that kind of instrumental photography.
Thy: So for us, we're going far beyond genre, so this is my roundabout way of answering your question. Were we tempted to say, "No, this is not a family photograph?" Not at all. We were open to hearing why people, our participants, thought this was a family photograph for them.
Cameron: Okay.
Thy: Brought in photographs of cats. You know, I don't dispute that an animal photo is a family photo.
Cameron: Yeah, in a sense, someone could keep a photograph taken by a company photographer of the corporate headquarters, and that could become part of the family's collection of photographs, because this is where granddad used to work.
Thy: That's correct.
Cameron: Right?
Thy: And in fact we had, yes ...
Cameron: Yeah, okay.
Thy: We had one person whose parents were prominent members of the Jewish business community within Toronto and whose mother was a bit of a socialite and had photos of her mother's women's group and the charities that she belonged to. But because those photographs were kept in the family album and were documenting what women did within the family. I thought that was really important, very useful to think of, to question, what we assume to be how gender surfaces in domestic albums.
Cameron: You talk about the family photos as having a gendered kind of ... I don't what other word ... "identity" is the word that you used, but a gendered quality to them. We think of family artifacts, family implements, family photographs, as somehow being feminine in our culture, in a way that the workplace and tools are considered masculine. How do you understand that in relation to your collection? I imagine that you are trying to breakdown that kind of a stereotype.
Thy: That's a really good point. I think it's ... You know, we are interested in how domesticity, which as generations of feminists have explained, and quite powerfully for me , is a way of breaking down the division between private and public spheres.
Cameron: Right.
Thy: That binary: public is where men dwell and private is where women dwell. So while at the same time that we acknowledge that women's roles were historically, and to present day, their capacity to navigate certain spaces is limited within a patriarchal world. One of the donations, for example, is by a woman who was accompanying her husband who worked for the United Nations, and she's Canadian, worked for the United Nations and was stationed, all over the decolonizing world, in 1947. So these are family photographs, which were also tourist photos that were documenting every day life during this incredible historical moment. So these are domestic photographs but also public photographs, that are telling us something about processes of decolonization, as seen through women's eyes and I wouldn't say that her eyes and her way of seeing was, you know, an appendage or an extension of her husband's role. It's fascinating to see how this domestic gaze complements, as well as departs from, the official gaze that he was able to offer. So I think that this is what nuancing gender in domestic images would help us to think more complexly about.
Cameron: In official histories, it's often remarked that there are particular voices that are silenced, women's voices often being one of them. I'm wondering about from the perspective of family photographs, what you have learned about what doesn't get doesn't photographed? Is there a silencing of some aspects of the family?
Thy: I'm always looking for that, actually. One of parts of the Royal Ontario Museum show was held at a second gallery, the Art Gallery of Mississauga. It was called the Missing Picture and it concerns photographs that for some reason people were not able to keep, that were destroyed or that were never made. And so one of our participants speaks about a period when he was first born, when his family lost all their money. They had a reversal of fortune and so he doesn't have any childhood photos, right? So there's a moment that was completely empty in his life. So it's more of the context in which photos are not made because of material circumstances, photographs that were lost in the course of war. So another participant speaks about the first set of photographs appearing in a refugee camp, which isn't a place where you would think you would want to be photographed, at your worst moments or your most desperate moments. But for them it represented a new life. They survived the Pol Pot era. They escaped Cambodia and their photographs, the narrator tells me quite movingly, they remember keeping it underneath their bed, their entire family collection. Then after the war ended, after it was safe to come back to Cambodia, they tried to return to their house and she thought for some reason they would find those photographs and they were completely gone. Of course, right?
Cameron: Mm-hmm.
Thy: But so those are some of the reasons that people wouldn't have photographs. But in terms of what subjects would be taboo, you think about family members who have been removed from the family. This is where the queer component of our project comes in. There's anecdotal evidence of people coming out and being removed from their family albums, and which is why the notion of a "found family" and the kinds of photographs that one takes with one's found family is such a powerful kind of expression, a rejoinder to that excision and erasure.
Cameron: You have kind of two separate parts to the archive. You've got the archive that's at the ROM, and you've got the archive that is at The ArQuives.
Thy: Yeah, that's their new name.
Cameron: This is the queer archives, the LGBTQ2+ archives.
Thy: Yes.
Cameron: Is there, just in your familiarity with the photos, is there something distinctive or something that is different thematically in the collection that's at the ArQuives as opposed to at the ROM?
Thy: Well, I wanted to say that, just because these are two collecting institutions, it's easy to assume that one is a straight archive and one's a queer archive.
Cameron: Yeah.
Thy: That's not at all the case. Some of the people who donated to the Royal Ontario Museum are actually queer, where they felt more comfortable for their own personal reasons to include their collections at the Royal Ontario Museum. In one case, a queer contributor decided that because he was already a volunteer and a board member at the ArQuives that he would want his entire collection to be held there. So I would hesitate to say that there is something intrinsically queer about the photograph. I think that what's really interesting is that there are queer components ... but this needs to be further explored ... there are queer components to every family photograph. People have argued, in fact, that the bachelor enclave experience within Chinatown constitutes a queer history of Chinese immigration, right? It's about the state compelling Chinese men to be non-normative in their community function.
Thy: So if you think about queer not as sexuality ...
Cameron: But as an Othering ...
Thy: Yes, as an Othering, or as kind of a way of queering the norm, then that opens us up to more interesting possibilities.
Cameron: Yeah, well, it's similar to the way in which you've used the word 'racialized" as opposed to "racial," right? That there is a constructive or constitutive process that creates the Other, whether it's the racialized Other or the queer Other.
Thy: Right, that's right.
Cameron: So these are ... I'm just trying to tie this into how you dealt with all these photos. It seems to me that there's a lot of determination left in the hands of the people who are contributing their photographs. They're choosing where they want them displayed?
Thy: Where they want them kept, yes.
Cameron: Where they want them kept ... Yeah, so you're not saying, "Okay, well, these photographs should go over to this archive and these should go over to the other." You're allowing the contributors to make that determination?
Thy: Yes, we are, and in that, we adhere to the principles of oral history of shared authority.
Cameron: Tell me more about that, shared authority.
Thy: It's the notion that the researcher is only one component of a project and this is where we take collaboration to its logical and necessary, I think, beginning, not conclusion. So the participant isn't compelled to participate solely in the ways that the researcher determines, right? We establish some of the parameters for the project and then we explain what the possible modes of participation actually are and we leave it open as to why, which collecting institutions they might be interested in, and we suggest to them which ones they would be a good fit for, but they choose. That said, the ArQuives themselves, the LGBTQ2+ they have a mission, right, where they're collecting things that are relating to LGBTQ experiences within Canada and so if your story doesn't relate to that, then it's not going to fit.
Cameron: Right, so they have a voice in this as well.
Thy: Of course.
Cameron: Okay.
Thy: I mean it's a community and activist archive.
Cameron: Okay.
Thy: And so those were the terms for partnership, too, right? We negotiate the objectives of each of the partners and consider how joining this larger project would be mutually beneficial and would advance each of our objectives.
Cameron: It seems to me that there's a really interesting tension between the personal and not simply the shared, but the official, right? It seems to me that what you're doing here is in a very profound way subversive of the idea that there is an official history of Canada, right? So at each point, we are using photographs to understand ourselves as individuals, ourselves as family members. What's the process by which that gets collected together to form a social understanding of our past as a country? Is it simply ... like you don't simply add up all of the experiences and then that's your total experience. There's an interplay in which some voices are privileged and some are silenced, in which some technologies come along, which change the way that we can understand and record ourselves. So all of these things are at play. But I wonder how you theorize this relationship between the intimate and the personal, and the public and shared/official?
Thy: You know, each of the very smart women that I work with and who challenge me by asking really difficult questions over the years, each of us has a different point of entry into the project. The person who's working with ArQuives, historian Elspeth Brown, is suspicious of the very concept of family, because she says it's normalizing, as a lot of queer theorists have argued, it's normalizing and to attach your political aspirations the concept of family, it's not particularly radical at all. And so she has sometimes talked about dispensing with the very notion of family photography. That becomes really difficult because there's no common language, so you're holding the category open and yet trying to empty it out so that it could be filled with something that is meaningful and useful to the people who are looking to be recognized in ways that they might not be able to articulate at the moment. My point of entry is I was really interested in the politicization of family.
Cameron: Okay.
Thy: So what you're talking about in terms of the state. I came at it ... I don't know ... through my own personal history, I suppose, where in the wake of the war in Vietnam, for example, certain families get recognized by the state. The family, the revolutionary side, gets recognized by the state and anthropologists have done studies and they've pointed out that those people who fought on the wrong side of the war ... and because within a single family one son would have fought for the North and another son fought for South ... there were no public ways of remembering the loss of those who pinned their hopes onto the wrong side. So that is a very distant way of thinking about the politicization of the family. But I turn to where we are now in Canada and the thing is that family is also politicized here. The category of immigration historically in the settler-colonial state, it was in the name of family values, assimilation, call it what you will, civilization, that the policy of cultural genocide against Indigenous people was committed. There was an attempt to rehabilitate family or to construct a supposedly civilized notion of family, and impose it upon Indigenous people. So for me that has been a primary question, to examine how the state has crafted, constructed, created, an official image of the nation through the projection of the universal family. And so that's one. I'm less interested in that, because it's something that we're very familiar with, right. It's not something that we need to have shown to us to recognize.
Cameron: Right.
Thy: I'm more interested in how marginalized people or minoritized people see that and they push back against it, how they turn to their own collections to navigate around that official image.
Cameron: So there are these acts of resistance that are recorded in these photographs as well.
Thy: Yeah, certainly.
Cameron: Resistance to the notion of family.
Thy: Or the notion of family as it has been defined in highly politicized ways.
Cameron: Right, yeah, well, these are powerful themes that echo through Canadian history, particularly with things like the 60s Scoop, you know the kidnapping, collection of children from First Nations communities and the residential school system. All of these things are profoundly related to our core identity as a nation. And you are also getting at so much of the dislocation of families that has been a part of our history for so long. If you think fairly recently of the Syrian refugee question and whether Canada should be admitting more or fewer families from Syria, but again, the notion of family is intimately bound up in that question, "What constitutes a family?" If you bring one person from Syria, who else gets to come in. And so when we're fighting over this issue as Canadians, we're not just fighting over the color of people that are allowed to be considered Canadian, but the relationships in which they constitute their identity that we find acceptable and so it becomes this tremendous battleground.
Thy: That's right.
Cameron: It's such an amazing collection, an amazing archive. Could you, as we're wrapping up, can you just describe the ways in which people can gain access to this now? So the exhibits are no longer on at the Royal Ontario Museum or is there a permanent exhibit of this?
Thy: No, they were only out for six months. In 2017, we had a show on Queering Family Photography with the Stephen Bulger Gallery, as part of Contact Photography Festival for that year, and that was up for about a month.
Cameron: Okay.
Thy: So the exhibits are no longer up but some of it is archived online.
Cameron: So what percentage of the photographs can be found through the websites? I'll provide the links on our podcast webpage but you had 17,000 photographs. Can you get a few hundred of them or thousands of them or what?
Thy: We have several hundreds of them currently up. The Royal Ontario Museum is working as fast as it can to catalog. It's a very slow process because they want to do it right. ArQuives, unfortunately, does not have the resources to put them all up, but you can access them and you just need to go to the ArQuives in downtown Toronto and request access to these photographs.
Cameron: There's also a documentary that you made out of this project, is that viewable anywhere? Is it on YouTube or anything like that?
Thy: The Queering Family Photography is a short 20 minute compilation of interviews that I can give you the access to. It's on Vimeo.
Cameron: Okay, great. We'll post that as well. Thy, thank you so much for taking the time to explain this amazing project. It's so evocative to see these pictures that people have considered very, very personal and the decision to share them with others is profound and I am filled with admiration for your role in making this happen.
Thy: I couldn't have done it alone. Thank you.
Cameron: Thank you for being on the podcast and look forward to further conversations with you in the future. Bye now.
Thy: Thank you. Bye.
Links
Faculty webpage for Thy Phu
Thy’s own website
Videos
Why Family Photographs Matter, by Mariam Golafshani
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: Family Camera Network, Western University
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: October 2, 2019
Location: York University, Toronto
