Photographer Alex Traube didn’t have much of a sense of family growing up. His parents were an unlikely couple — his father, a child of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, was 49 when Alex was born, and his mother, who was born in Mexico City to Hispanic parents, was 19.
They divorced before their son turned two, and the only relatives he knew were an uncle and his paternal grandparents, who were quite elderly. (His father engineered de facto custody of Alex by simply forgetting to return him to his ex-wife at the end of a de jure visitation period.)
Now the longtime Santa Fean is assembling a very large extended family, and Pasatiempo readers can be part of it. Traube is June’s artist in residence at the Vladem Contemporary, where his project Family Photos/Fotos de Familias takes place on four consecutive Sundays, starting June 2.
Traube describes the project as an endeavor “to produce what will become, over time, a historical document, an ‘artifact’ of diverse New Mexico family life — Hispano-Anglo-Native/gay-straight-blended — in the first part of the 21st century.” Every family he photographs will receive a sepia-toned digital version of its image, which will also be added to his online gallery of family photos at traubephoto.com/families.
It’s only recently, Traube says, that he’s realized how often he’s returned to the touchstone of family photographs over his career. “My first professional success was in 1976 with a project called Letters to My Father. It consisted of 10 family photos, each of which included a handwritten personal narrative statement.”
The theme reappeared in 1993, in a variation, when Traube was finishing a master’s degree program at Chicago’s Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “I was living in an area called Graceland West, which had this clearly defined sensibility and even its own neighborhood newspaper,” he recalls.
“I posted flyers and invited everyone to come have their portraits done. I also interviewed them, with just two questions—’What family were you born into’ and ‘What can you tell me about your chosen family?’ — and the responses were incredible. People were so generous; it was a blessed time in my life.”
The subjects also let Traube photograph their old family snapshots, and he wove the snapshots, his own photos, and the interviews together into a series of large digital prints called Family Album Chicago.
Traube says he provides “very little direction” to his subjects on how they should be posed. “Sometimes people spontaneously touch each other; sometimes they do other things, and it often ends up truly wonderful. I come away enriched from taking each of these photos.”
