ALISA SWINDELL
Associate Curator of Photography
Hood Quarterly, fall 2025
From its inception, photography has served numerous roles as a signifier of identity and especially one's place within socially and governmentally determined systems, including state-sanctioned familial relationships. In the late 19th century, small personal cameras became available, which promptly led to the creation and popularity of family photo albums and baby books. Soon the family photo became established as the de rigueur way to visually acknowledge kinship. However, ties of blood and the nuclear family are not the only way to understand kinship, and photography has long played a role in these other visual paradigms as well.
Visual Kinship engages with these other relational modes built through (if not regulated by) photography. Co-curated by Alisa Swindell (the Hood Museum's associate curator of photography), Thy Phu (distinguished professor, Arts, Culture and Media, University of Toronto Scarborough), Kimberly Juanita Brown (associate professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, and director of Dartmouth's Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life), and Iyko Day (Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English, Mount Holyoke College), the exhibition draws upon three frameworks to consider the relationship between photography and kinship. As co-curator and conceptual originator Thy Phu says, "Visual Kinship challenges us to see family not as a fixed structure but as something formed through connection, nurtured through care, and continually reimagined. From colonial archives to refugee dreams, the photographs in this exhibition reveal how images shape our sense of belonging, trace the ties that bind us, and open up new ways of being in relation."
The photography in this exhibition opens new approaches to how we recognize our relationships with others and when those then become (or are rejected as) a type of kinship. The images range from ideas about how we hold onto ties of kinship to critiques of the complex processes that legitimize familial connections to explorations of the acts of care that deepen friendships until they become families of choice. Nancy Rivera's Family Portrait series, for example, uses cross-stitch to recreate photographs of the artist and her parents that have been used to legitimize their citizenship documents. Rivera chose this type of needlecraft, passed down across generations of women in her family, to recreate these photographs as a means of connecting herself to traditions that were in some ways lost to her through the immigration process. Coyote Park's Healing with My Brother, Nassim (2020) depicts two young trans men sharing a moment of tenderness as one cares for the other after surgery. One of the men kisses his friend's head as he helps clean the other's wounds, and the patient makes a loving gesture in return. Between them, the image suggests, are a care and understanding that surpass those of the nuclear family. Zig Jackson uses humor to picture connections to a place or a land. In his self-portrait titled China Basin District (negative 1997, print 1997–98), Jackson plays into media images of Native Americans by wearing a headdress while posting signs that pronounce the reclamation of stolen Indigenous land.
All three of the concepts used as frameworks for this exhibition come together in Sim Chi Yin's installation The Suitcase Is a Little Bit Rotten. The iteration of this project commissioned for Visual Kinship consists of ten contemporary versions of 19th-century amusements, magic lanterns, and a video work that is premiering in the exhibition. Sim has created interventions regarding the colonial photographs printed on magic lantern slides to speak to her family's multigenerational histories and the way colonialism, war, state violence, and immigration have impacted those relationships.
Hopefully, this exhibition will provide you with new ways to think about belonging and the various systems that support or refute feelings of connection. It also sheds light upon how these notions of kinship are mediated through photography, especially by contemporary artists who use archives, government documents, and media tropes as their starting points.