“I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions” by Rafael Goldchain

“Photography is like a mosaic; it achieves its full synthesis only when presented en masse.” - August Sander

I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions, a reconstructed family album created by Toronto-based artist Rafael Goldchain, is one of the most multilayered, engaging, photographic books I have come across in a long time. It contains an introduction by art historian and author Martha Langford, a statement by the artist and 56 plates of portraits, in each of which the artist, appropriately and professionally made-up and costumed, photographs himself posing as one of his ancestors or relatives. There is also an appendix containing examples of project sketchbooks, production stills from the photography sessions, charts of the Goldchain family tree and historic photographs of some of the family members Goldchain has chosen to recreate.

Born and brought up in Chile, Rafael Goldchain came to Canada in 1975 after studying for five years in Israel. The son of exiles and an exile himself, he could be a poster child for our ongoing, diasporic age. Jewish and originally Polish, many of his family were fortunate enough to leave Europe in the 1920s and ’30s with most settling in South America. Of those who didn’t emigrate, we are told none survived the Shoah, a word Goldchain makes a point of substituting for Holocaust because of its Jewish specificity.

Before going on, I feel I should say that I almost recused myself from writing this review. The cynic in me was deeply dubious about the idea of manufacturing an after-the-fact family album. It sounded as if it could be too contrived, too much of just an art project. I wondered, too, whether my inherent distrust of the photographic portrait should disqualify me, for, apart from its earliest examples and possibly photo-booth pictures, I consider the formal, photographic portrait to be a seriously suspect form. The one attribute common to all such images is that, without exception, they are a record of a performance, a photograph of a person or persons having their picture taken. Here I am, they all say; this is me being photographed; this is how I look or, more accurately, choose to present myself and that, most often, for only some tiny fraction of a second. Trouble is, because it is the photographer who creates the context and chooses that tiny fraction of a second, usually what results is more a record of the photographer’s performance than the subject’s.

Self-portraits, though, are different and the ones in I Am My Family substantially so. The images both parody the portrait form and expand upon it, with the whole becoming a collective self-portrait that simultaneously encompasses the photographer/subject, his family, his heritage and his culture. This conflation is in itself an impressive achievement, but even more remarkable is the way the work also conflates time. While the book’s title addresses only the present—I am me, yes, but me is also all of those from whom I come—what the title doesn’t imply and the photographs clearly do is not only I am, but also, I have always been and will continue to be. This is not an understanding easily grasped by Western thought, although it is integral to other cultures. In The City of Words, (House of Anansi Press, 2007), the book version of his 2007 Massey Lectures, Alberto Manguel describes Inuit understanding of memory and imagination as being “ … exactly equivalent to present experience….” For Inuit, he says, “ … that which is remembered is the reality in which we live, physically and imaginatively … what is imagined and told as happening takes place … all at once, past, present and future.” As a consequence, looking into these photographs is frequently unsettling. At the simplest level, we know that all we’re really seeing are recently made images of someone playing dress-up in a studio. Yet, somehow, the images themselves are so engaging that rationality is constantly being overwhelmed by illusion, an illusion frequently reinforced by an accompanying story about the purported “subject,” the performer/photographer or both. More surprising is that even after comparing Goldchain’s recreation to the image of the original, as revealed in one of the appended, historic photographs, often it is the re-creation that seems more true.

There are a number of reasons for this, but foremost must be Goldchain’s extraordinary ability to perform for the camera. Even in those rare instances where the costuming and make-up are less than perfect, it just doesn’t seem to matter; Goldchain inhabits his creations so absolutely, any imperfections seem more to reflect their character than any failure of process. While all of the photographs are in one way or another striking, for me two in particular stand out. The subject of the first, Self-Portrait as Doña Reizl Goldszajn Rozenfeld, has no precedent; she is a fiction, a representation of what Goldchain describes as “ … the middle-aged, stylish woman suffering from chronic, mild depression common to every family.” She looks down, away from the lens into a distance beyond the camera, her eyes and mouth tinged with resignation. What we see of her dress is a high, circular collar, chosen no doubt to pair with a string of pearls to emphasize and lengthen her neck. Her lipstick is just a little sloppy and her luxuriant hair, a straggling mass of careless disarray. Photoshop has smoothed the skin, softened the forehead, the nose, jaw and neck. She is imagination brought to life.

The subject of the other is one of the only two children Goldchain portrays. The first, and first in the series, is his grandfather, whom he presents as a 14- or 15-year-old Polish schoolboy. The second, and last in the series, is titled Self-Portrait as Chaim Goldszayn (Laughing). In common with the other relatives Goldchain performs, we are also given the dates and locations of this boy’s birth and death: b. Poland, early 1930s, d. Poland early 1940s. An astonishing, daring image, the apparent spontaneity of this portrait differentiates it from any preceding it. It shows a man facing the camera. His eyes are tight shut, his mouth wide open. The curled peyos of Jewish orthodoxy spring out from beneath his cap. He is clearly not a child and there is no apparent effort to make him appear so. This is the photographer as himself, being his relative, who died at the age of ten in Nazi-occupied Poland. “Laughing,” the title reads, yet it is impossible to view this image without seeing also the wrenched distortion of a Baconesque scream. It is an ambiguity that thrusts the image far beyond its Jewish referent, making of it as well an acknowledgement and passionate celebration of the dichotomous existentiality common to us all. ■

I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions, Rafael Goldchain, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008, cloth, 168pp, $40.00 USD.

Richard Holden is a photographer who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.