POST

Familia

Monday June 13th, 2011

Portugal-based photographer Isabel Pinto has always been interested in relationships. Even as a child, she would watch people interact with each other—how they talked, touched, laughed and became angry with one another. “I would absorb all those inner tensions, and be very happy when kids were laughing with their parents.”

This interest in human interactions only grew deeper with age. Isabel went on to study anthropology, “as a way to deepen my love for humans, and their creations,” then pursued a career in photography. Eventually, “I realized that after 20 years shooting, I had always been shooting the same subject— relations—intimate, affective relations in family.”

This inquisitive nature towards relationships and love of human interaction inspired Isabel to create a photo book focusing on the epitome of close relationships—the family. Documenting families through photography was something she was incredibly interested in. She also wanted to prove that happiness and closeness can create art just as beautiful as melodrama and pain. As written in the introduction to her book, “the joy of an encounter is not on the list of favorite topics for contemporary art.” Isabel set out to prove them wrong, and accomplished this beautifully with her book, Familia.

The description of her book is as follows,

Every Family is a Nation, a land of intense story lines: intimacies, complexities, tensions. A portrait of a Family is always a document of a relationship. The bodies of mothers and children, grandparents and siblings – tender, intertwined – tell us everything. They tell us everything we need to know; things they do not know they are saying. The 97 portraits of these 45 families tell never-ending stories we all want to take a peek at, stories in which we can all see ourselves.

In creating the book, Isabel photographed 45 different families. I asked her how she went about finding subjects for her project,

As for the choosing of the families, they are those I crossed by in life—friends, clients, my own family, situations I was in and could just grab the moment. Some families posed for me, others were just having their moment and I was there. But yes, a degree of confidence is necessary, and I could relate to all of them. For instance, the photo of Mariza, the well known Fado singer, was a relaxing moment after a shooting for her record. Chulpan Kamatova, a Russian actress with her daughter, was during her stay in Portugal, when she acted in my brother’s film, America. Also, actress Branka Katic and her family, I stayed at their house when in Los Angeles, so l was inside the family environment for a whole month. Other families are not in the book, but stayed in my heart. The editing was based only in my emotional relation to the photos.

Isabel asserts that just because she chose to photograph mostly tender and happy moments, doesn’t mean that these families are perfect and without their dynamic tensions. She just insists that she just likes, “the bright side of life,” and wants to share that joy with the world.