A Historical Approach to Family Photography: Class and Individuality in Manchester and Lille, 1850–1914

The historian cannot afford to dismiss family photographs as mere symbols of bourgeois hegemony as critics and sociologists have done. Workers, moreover, frequently obtained their portraits, not to imitate their bourgeois “superiors,” but to show their pride in their own accomplishments and their children’s. Family collections of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century can open up a world of life, death, aspirations, and sorrows when we investigate the archive surrounding such images. Here the author investigates the stories behind family collections in two European industrial towns, in order to discover how ordinary men and women use photography to construct their own histories.