JJ Levine’s Alone Time 19, taken in 2021, appears to be a conventional portrait of a traditional nuclear family: mother, father, two children, all gathered in a living room. We know the little girl is a little girl because she’s in a floral dress and has a pink bow plonked on her head. The little boy wears blue jeans and a backwards baseball cap. Look closer, though, and you begin to see a resemblance between not just the kids but also their parents who (despite different hairstyles, clothes and poses) share the same features and build. In the series Alone Time, Montréal-based artist Levine creates images of couples – and in this case a couple and their kids – with one model playing both sides of the couple, upending the idea that gender is fixed.
“There’s a tension in all my work between reality and fiction,” says Levine, who produces carefully constructed photographic portraits of parents and children, lovers and friends. Even the works in his Queer Portraits series, which show real people from the queer and trans community, are carefully staged. The choice of setting and props can be about the sitter’s personality, as in grand historical portraits, or it can be about colour, pattern and composition. “What’s interesting,” he says, “is that someone might see this particular image and think it’s the most real of all the families I’ve photographed, even though it’s completely made up.”
Levine is one of 64 artists included in Real Families: Stories of Change, a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in collaboration with the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge. Curated by the former director of the centre, psychologist Susan Golombok, the show explores modern family forms as depicted by artists primarily over the past 50 years. According to Golombok, it was in the mid-1970s that the configurations began to shift in earnest, partly because of the increase in separations and divorce, and partly because of the introduction of reproductive technologies. Since then, changes in social attitudes and scientific advances have made room for gay fathers, lesbian mothers and single parents by choice, all of whom (and more) are seen on the Fitzwilliam’s walls.
But what makes a family portrait? According to Alison Smith, chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery, the answer is simple: it’s something that says “we are a family”. Symbolic images of succession and ancestry can be dated back to the ancient Egyptians, but it was in the 16th and 17th centuries that representational images of recognisable sitters emerged. With urbanisation and the development of the middle classes came a flourishing art market, which created a demand for portraits that signified rank, alliances and wealth.
A handful of historical portraits are included in the exhibition, including Sir Joshua Reynolds’ The Braddyll Family (1789), which shows father and son, as well as dutiful wife and dog (the three daughters don’t appear since they were unable to inherit). “Often these early portraits were social signifiers,” says Smith. “And while similar portraits are commissioned today, often by well-established families, artists are also independently exploring interiority, family dynamics – even charting their own journey.”
Joy Labinjo’s foray into portrait painting began with her own family. During her final year at Newcastle University, she had a desire to paint Black people but no access to models beside herself and one or two friends. “I went home for the Easter holidays and brought a family photo album back with me, not knowing what I would use it for,” she says. She then began to lift the figures from the photographs and combine them with patterns and backgrounds from other sources. “That was how I found my voice.”
As well as exploring her own lived experience as a British Nigerian, Labinjo’s portraits capture those moments that we can all relate to, no matter our heritage: eating breakfast, lounging on the sofa, all sorts of celebrating. With works such as Having the Conversation (2020), which shows a granddaughter in her grandmother’s lap, she also holds up a mirror to society. “I made it during the pandemic, just after George Floyd was killed,” she says. “I was thinking about race and what it means to be Black in a majority-white country, and the idea came to me. Most people of colour have ‘the conversation’ with a parent or a grandparent or an uncle at some point in their life. I wanted to paint a gentle, loving family scene; if it weren’t for the title, it would be just that.”
Caroline Walker, too, uses the personal to say something universal. After completing a series of paintings and drawings in the maternity wing at UCLH in 2021, she chose to make a series about a new mother’s next steps. “When you’re pregnant, so much emphasis is put on labour and birth, and very little is said about what happens when you leave the hospital,” she says. “I wanted to show a more subjective view of the transition into motherhood and the domestic space in which so much of this time is spent.”
While art history is full of images of motherhood, Walker feels that they’re often simplistic, “idealised or romantic rather than reflecting the reality of the day-to-day experience”. With her series Lisa (2022), which shows her sister-in-law over a period of four months, she explores what motherhood looks like now, with all the clutter that accompanies it. Babygrows loll out of open drawers. Half-drunk glasses of orange squash collect on a coffee table. “If some of the historical portrayals of this subject were timeless, I want mine to be the opposite, showing the reality of life with a baby at a specific moment in time.”
Which is what she and her fellow artists in Real Families do so well: capture unfiltered the nature and quality of family life, dynamics and transitions. The joy and affection, but also the tension, hostility and estrangement. Both Golombok and Smith point out that historical portraits are in many ways a front, behind which lurks a whole load of dysfunction. Artists today are teasing that out.
Among the best is Chantal Joffe, who remembers realising while she was studying at the Royal College of Art in the early 1990s not only that she could paint her parents, but that it was a good way of contemplating her relationship with them. Ever since, she has committed herself and the rest of her family to canvas again and again. “Through painting I’m always trying to conjure the complexity of those relationships, the push and pull, the desire for closeness and at the same time the rejection of it,” she says. “By painting my own family, I guess in a weird way I’m also trying to get enough distance to breathe – because that’s families, isn’t it? If I can make a picture of them, I’m not going to be completely consumed.”
When Joffe became a mother, she too found herself wanting to describe how it felt: the physicality, the intensity, the ambivalence. “I was trying to channel with those early paintings of [her daughter] Esme how hard it was for me, becoming a mum, and the complexity of me as a painter, what that meant,” she says. The exhibition concludes with 10 of her portraits, one of which, Mother and Child II (2005), shows the artist leaning over her tiny daughter. Joffe is nude, her dark hair falling forwards over her shoulders, her eyes – equally dark – wildly wide. “I look a bit deranged, I think, because I was trying to show more honestly how it felt to be me.”
Like Joffe, JJ Levine has spent his creative life compiling an archive of family portraits by photographing the same people over extended periods. Also included in Real Families are three intimate images that show the artist, his former partner Harry, and their daughter Joah. Among the most powerful is Harry Pregnant (2015), a portrait of a transgender man surrounded by house plants, cradling his swelling belly. When I ask Levine how he feels about them going on display, he tells me that although he’s pleased, at first the selection gave him pause. “Because really, these are linked to what other people might understand as my family,” he says. “Of course, my child is my family – there’s no question about that. But so is my best friend’s kid, and so are my friends. For me, the word ‘family’ refers to my friends, my community.”
• Real Families: Stories of Change is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 7 January
