by Riley Landau.

Winner of the 2025 Student Art Writing Prize, presented by the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Riley Landau writes on Amos Gebhardt’s Family Portrait. The Prize invited UWA students to respond to exhibitions held at the Gallery in 2025. The three winning essays will be published on the LWAG website, joining an archive of past winners.

‘I think being queer with diasporic Jewish and European heritage, I’ve always been interested in the outside, in spaces of resistance, of fluidity, of impermanence.’

‘My purpose is to make “kin” mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy.’ 

Both art and archive, the photo is the historian’s fantasy; a perfect reproduction of a single moment in time. But like all good fantasies, there is more than meets the eye. To view photos as merely archival material reduces them to a static relic. The truth is, behind every photo exists a photographer with an active ideology at play. They have both receptive and productive potential, simultaneously recording and shaping the viewer’s notion of past, present and future.[3]
        Take the family portrait, surely a simple picture. It is a visual snapshot of a family at some point in time, a lovely token to hang on a wall and admire. But surrounding every snapshot, hovering in the next unphotographed moment, is the rehearsed performativity of a family image. The purpose of a family portrait is not to document the family life. If it were, the average family photo would feature far more tantrums, despondent teenagers and sleep deprived parents bordering between human and zombie. Rather, the family portrait insists upon itself. It shouts, ‘Look at our happy family. All orderly. All smiling. All normal.’ In this way, family portraits reinforce a normativity of what a family should be.[4] They do more than produce memories, they mediate what anthropologists would call kin, the series of social and blood relationships that constitute an individual’s notion of family.
        Anthropology’s study of kinship, however, has a problem. Like any attempt to understand the entirety of human existence, kinship studies fails to recognise the abject expansiveness of human experience. As a result, it has historically devolved into a coagulation of essentialist discourse, that prioritises blood lines over genuine social relations.[5] Staring at Amos Gebhardt’s Family Portrait, I was overcome with a sense of relief. On a rare occasion for the genre of family photography, Gebhardt constructs a portrait free of this rehearsed performativity and the problematics of kinship. Gebhardt’s Portrait is best understood through the lens of this omission resulting in a reading of the work as an active resistance to normative kinship, achieved by queering the traditional family portrait. In doing so, Gebhardt presents a world of utopian kinship, a world where coexistence triumphs.   
        In Family Portrait’s central panel, two men stand in the centre, framed by a halo of light and holding between them their child. Surrounding the couple are a host of figures. One kneels in a peach dress, their chest exposed as they present a platter of Turkish delights. Another figure kneels closer to the foreground, bedecked in lingerie and surrounded by books, candles and rose petals, where she seems to perform some form of literary love spell. Between them a man stands tall in a crimson kaftan, his hand enlightened by the radiating light of an evil eye. To describe the rich detail of every figure in the portrait would be an insurmountable effort, Gebhardt captures a shocking array of diversity so simply and lovingly that words fail to articulate the sense of originality that pervades each individual in the frame. Gebhardt denies the portrait its typical power to flatten notions of kinship, instead giving each individual their own character separate to the family they belong to.
        But here lies a quite significant problem: ten figures in frame and yet a map of relationships cannot be derived from the portrait. Quite simply, this stems from Gebhardt’s rejection of the typical framing of family portraiture. Often a family portrait will suggest in some capacity a form of hierarchy. In Gebhardt’s rendition, each figure exists in their own right, inextricably tied to a whole and simultaneously content in their individuality. Such framing, that blurs the part/whole dichotomy, reflects a form of kinship oft omitted from family portraits: that of chosen family. While traditional kinship focuses on the marital or consanguineous connections that compose a heteronormative family, the idea of chosen family resists classification and definition. It is undefinable precisely because it exists outside the nuclear paradigm of Western kinship (see Weston for an example of kinship studies focused beyond consanguinity). Chosen family exists via the inseparable bond between two individuals connected through nothing but shared experience and an agreement that ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’.[6] The queer community inherently gravitates to the idea of a chosen family, partly due to a shared history of rejection but also a shared ability to experience radical queer joy.
        The point I am attempting to make is that kinship is strange. Traditional anthropology has, and to this day continues to, overemphasise the role that blood and genetics play in the relationships around us. Yet, ask any queer person in today’s world and they will, almost invariably, see family more broadly. This is not to say queer people are structurally incapable of being close with their family. I love my mother and know many other queer people who feel the same. But she and I will never bond over my queerness. And yet it brings me in such close connection with the many queer individuals who surround me in my life. The paradox of queerness is that it simultaneously separates you from the nuclear family yet offers a whole new family: a chosen family. It is this type of family that Gebhardt captures so expertly, not the rehearsed performance of heterosexuality, nor some reductive chosen family that’s really just a nuclear family in disguise. Rather, Gebhardt encapsulates the truly beautiful eclecticism of queer kinship. With each individual existing as such an independent figure within their own right, family is presented as a bond between individuals. This opposes the stereotype of family portraiture, that flattens individuals and restricts them within a hierarchical structure of kinship. Gebhardt’s appropriation of the family portrait, thus, negotiates the tension between the idea of family and the experience of queerness. They recognise the power of photography to not only archive but to produce familial dynamics, and through this recognition they invert the heteronormative notion of family.
        This deconstruction of kin which Gebhardt pursues resembles the radical kinship Donna Haraway argues for in Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Much like Gebhardt, Haraway sees kin as ‘relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes,’[7] it is an ‘assembling sort of word’.[8] What Haraway offers is a reading of kinship not just in its potential to resist normative structures, but in kinship’s capacity to mend, connect and transcend. For Haraway, kin is the solution to a world in crisis. By finding relations without ties and forming bonds beyond the human, we might forge a path out of the rampant ecological crisis. This ecological addition to the notion of kin may seem distant to Gebhardt’s Family Portrait but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
        Gebhardt sets their portrait away from the domestic space, choosing instead a lush jungle complete with ferns, a leafy floor and a plethora of trees in the background. Each individual occupies this green space, suggesting they partake in nature without seeking to control it. There is something oddly queer about nature, like queerness itself, it exists on the fringes. It exists outside of urban structures both physically and symbolically. It is this symbiosis that Gebhardt finds one more kin, that of the environment. Thus, Gebhardt further resists the normative dynamic of the family portrait. By refusing to submit to the domestic setting, they invigorate the notion of kinship with Haraway’s ecological affinity, presenting a portrait that asserts the connection between human and non-human.
        Altogether, Gebhardt’s Family Portrait flips the generic conventions of its namesake and actively produces a narrative of kinship that is explicitly queer, non-conformist and ecologically conscious. This testament to the power of photography encourages the attentive viewer to queer their kinships, step into the natural world and resist normative narratives that pervade our day.

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Footnotes:

1. Amos Gebhardt, “Q&A with Amos Gebhardt,” PHOTO Australia, 2021, https://photo.org.au/channel/qa-with-amos-gebhardt/.

2. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (May 2015): 161, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.

3. Mette Sandbye, “Looking at the Family Photo Album: A Resumed Theoretical Discussion of Why and How,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 6, no. 1 (January 2014), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v6.25419.

4. Ibid.

5. David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000247749.

6. Oakley Hands, “Oakley Hands Reflects on ‘Family Portrait’ by Amos Gebhardt,” Murdoch University, 19 November 2024, https://www.murdoch.edu.au/50years/news/oakly-hands-reflects-on--family-portrait--by-amos-gebhardt.

7. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (May 2015): 161, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.

8. Ibid., 162.

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Image credit: Amos Gebhardt, Family Portrait, 2020, archival inkjet pigment print, trifold hinged triptych. Courtesy of the artist.