In Defense of Civil Rights: The Paradoxical Power of Family Photographs. (Feature) (2002)

Activists have long used photographs and text to draw attention to social issues, employing visual strategies that range from muck-racking journalistic exposees to satiric photo-collages. Since 1993, two activists in Amherst, Massachusetts have been working steadily on the issue of social stigma, using upbeat family photographs and personal interviews as their tools. Calling their organization Diversity Projects, photographer Gigi Kaeser and writer Peggy Gillespie focus on individuals at risk of discrimination, represented within their family context. Diversity Projects' four works to date deal with multiracial families; with lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) parents; with families, in which at least one member suffers from mental illness; and most recently with a compendium of families of mixed types. Their latest book, to Hide: Mental illness in the (2002), made in collaboration with Jean J. Beard and published this past October, is an important extension of this w ork. The first three projects. (Of Many Colors: Many Portraits of Multiracial Families, Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Parents and Their Families and Nothing to Hide: Mental Illness in the Family) have been published as books. The fourth project (In Our Family) is used as a middle school curriculum. However, all four projects came into being, and continue to function, as traveling exhibitions. (1) The exhibitions have been widely circulated and continue to be in heavy demand nation-wide. While three of them, including the work on mental illness, have met with near universal appreciation, Love Makes a Family--the exhibition on families with at least one LGBT parent--has been surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, controversial. This project offers a particularly rich opportunity to examine the use of positive images as an activist strategy. The work is conceptualized not as art or literature, but as public education, and Kaeser and Gillespie have been particularly interested in having their exhibitions shown in school settings. They especially want to reach young people who may be at risk or who may find themselves in a position to support others who are. It is in the school context that the Love Makes a Family project has proved particularly provocative. In 1996, the showing of Love Makes a Family in Amherst elementary schools stirred up strong responses ranging from enthusiastic support to greater or lesser degrees of homophobia, all vocally aired in local media. The five families most virulently opposed to the exhibition filed a lawsuit against the school superintendent and individual principals. The suit, which charged sexual harrassment of young viewers, was dismissed in court, with provisions made so that parents who objected to the exhibition could request that their children not participate in classroom discussions of it. Elsewhere in the country, other compromises were reached to avoid confrontation, although Love Makes a Family is still met with regular complaints when it is shown in schools. In addition, posters announcing recent showings of the exhibition in corporate settings have been anonymously torn down, in apparent acts of hostility toward their content. Kaeser and Gillespie were initially surprised at the hostile responses to their work, especially since they had included a few portraits of gay and lesbian families, with no outcry, in their previous exhibition on the subject of multiracial families. Apparently, when the title and text of the exhibition clearly identified the people in the pictures as LGBT families, the photographs took on different, potentially threatening, meanings. Activist Photographs What makes Kaeser's benign family portraits so politically charged? With understated brilliance, she uses typical photographic structures to picture atypical family groupings. …