I'd love to start at the beginning. Could you please tell me what sparked your interest in family photography? For me, these images are part of our collective heritage – the people who had cameras were agents recording our collective memory. I also think we are in the last decade before this heritage will vanish.

Rachael Moloney: I have many reasons for being interested in this field of photography. The first is very personal – my maternal grandmother, Mary Pacey, was a keen amateur photographer in the early 20th century. She was working class and owned a Kodak Brownie, one of the early cameras that women in particular would use at that time. She had no training and in my opinion was a very good amateur photographer. Sadly, due to her class and lack of spare money when she married, she was unable to take her interest in photography further. Admittedly, then, my early experience of looking at vernacular photos  had an emotive element. I wanted to find out more about other amateur photographer’s stories and what people were expressing through the medium. 

‘Elsie, Joyce, Mother’, 1920s. Photograph by Mary Pacey

There is great, if sometimes subtle, variety in vernacular family photography, but common themes, which you quickly detect looking through numerous family albums. The creativity in these albums is really striking, not only expressed through the photography, but the way in which people compiled their albums. I am very interested in the captions, annotations and poetry that we see in many of albums in our archive. Vernacular photography is such a rich field to tap into and so layered in terms of its representation of the concept of ‘family’ over a century and more. Meeting Nigel, by chance actually, in 2017, and learning about the vernacular photography collection that he had built up, was the perfect opportunity to launch a project together. 

Nigel Martin Shephard: Since my mid-teens, I've been going to bric-a-brac sales. It was a whole cultural scene among my generation. Around my late 20s, I found two family photo albums. Thereafter I wanted to collect more, because I was fascinated looking at these photos. It's an intimate insight into history and it was, and still is, thrilling. I started to buy more albums, and I have to say that, at the time, now more than 30 years ago, people treated me as if I was some kind of weirdo collecting them. After acquiring several albums, I began to learn how to read the images. And that's what drew me in. 

I know a lot of bric-a-brac traders now and they call me when they have something interesting. When I started collecting albums, it was actually the first time they had started to appear in general circulation. Amateur photography did not start to really grow until the 1880s, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that many of this generation died and their albums were passed on if no one knew what to do with them. 

Do you find these images aesthetically interesting beside the history they communicate? 

Rachael Moloney: Yes. Amateur photographic practice breaks many conventional photographic ‘rules’. There is a casualness and lack of self-consciousness in the act of taking the photograph. Sometimes you sense, or imagine, that the amateur is playing with the camera without caring too much about the end result. There is a great freedom, and joy, in that.

Summer Camp, Suffolk, 1996, The Family Museum Archive. Photographer unknown

May I ask how big your collection is?

Nigel Martin Shephard: The earliest printed photographs in the collection date to the 1860s and the most recent to the early noughties. In terms of individual photographs, we have around 40,000 in the archive and over 600 photo albums. The size of the collection is less important than how comprehensive it is – I have collected to ensure that most decades in the past 160 years are represented.

Carte de visite, 1860s-1870s, The Family Museum Archive

Where did the name The Family Museum come from? 

Rachael Moloney: We talked a lot early on in the project about wanting to focus on albums as much as single images. This was because we were interested in discovering and showcasing diverse family narratives, which you can detect more easily across multiple photos in an album. The concept of a ‘museum’ – a place to display and share these stories – aligned with our mission.

What are the rules you follow to expand your collection? Are there any specific things you are looking for? 

Rachael Moloney: Nigel has started to collect digital images and some Super 8 home movies in the past few years, so the collection is no longer confined to prints and film photography. Thematically we're very open, because we find new areas of interest all the time. For example, we have a lot of military photography dating to the two world wars, which is a less obvious niche of vernacular photography. It's very revealing of what life was like for ordinary soldiers during this time, including the reconstruction period just after the second world war. 

The subject of the ‘family holiday’ has many sub-themes within it, such as changing fashion trends and holiday destinations. Looking at different photographic formats, such as tintypes, Edwardian Stickybacks and photobooth strips, also creates lots of avenues to explore. Nigel has collected a significant amount of amateur photographic equipment, dating from the earliest Kodak cameras, which provides an overview of how the ‘machinery’ impacted the taking and styling of amateur photographs over the last century and a half. All in all, our approach to vernacular photography is very holistic. 

Polaroid, mid-1960s, The Family Museum Archive. Photographer unknown

Nigel Martin Shephard: Polaroid photographs are really special for me, simply because I know that I'm holding in my hand the same object that the person in the photograph held in theirs. It’s a very tactile experience dealing with these images. For our 2022 exhibition, 100 Tintypes: Artists and Hustlers, I chose to focus on tintypes because they are almost entirely ignored and not many people pay attention to them. I had gathered a good collection of them. I'm interested in the photographs that people have forgotten.

American Gem tintype, circa 1900, The Family Museum Archive

Nigel, it seems that more and more you are interested in contemporary and digital family photography?

Nigel Martin Shephard: Absolutely. At the moment, I am really enjoying some ‘digital archaeology'. I buy old compact digital cameras and then sell them at Spitalfields Market in East London. There are almost always photographs left on the internal memory of these cameras. I wrote a blog, Got My Mojo Working, about one of these discoveries. The photos show a young guy, probably in his early 20s, getting ready for a big night out. He photographed himself repeatedly in the mirror, in different poses and from different angles, while he got ready. Because these are digital images, they’re time-stamped so you can track his actions.

Where do you think vernacular photography's popularity comes from nowadays?

Nigel Martin Shephard: We have passed the Rubicon into digital culture, so there’s a growing historical interest in the printed form. Nostalgia and sentimentality are the warp and weft of film photographs. I meet a lot of people who write about vernacular photography and sometimes I feel they're trying to squeeze it into an intellectual box where it doesn't belong. It’s not art. No matter how you look at art, it is consciously created and has a different motivation to vernacular photography. Nosiness, being a ‘nosy parker' as we say in the UK, can also be a factor. When Annebella Pollen of University of Brighton wrote an article for the second edition of our zine, Famzine 2, she highlighted the fact that vernacular photographs can reveal forgotten or marginalised stories. For me, it's the very ordinariness of these stories that is appealing. I'm not looking for something ‘unique’ or ‘special’, but what is ordinary in it all. I don’t want to elevate these photographs to irrelevant heights.

Rachael Moloney: Nostalgia is certainly a key factor and, as Nigel says, that will only grow as we advance further into the digital and AI age. As a journalist and editor, I have noticed vernacular photography being used more and more by artists and art directors, and in advertising and branding. Galleries and museums are also paying more attention to vernacular photography than previously. It was always there as a subject of interest, but very much on the periphery. The increasing number of academics studying vernacular photography is drawing more attention to it as a field of study within visual culture and photographic history. 

I also think the way traditional definitions of ‘family’ are changing has had a big impact on the appeal of ‘family photography’. People are looking harder at some of these images and questioning who is in them, who took them and why? 

Do you collect oral histories alongside the images, or do you orchestrate any special research to find out more about the images’ context? 

Rachael Moloney: It certainly is part of our mission to build up a collection of oral histories connected to photographs in the collection. We don't have anything out there publicly yet, but on our drawing board we have filmed conversations with people who are speaking about their own photo album. We also want to work with people suffering from Alzheimer's  Disease or dementia, and the elderly, particularly people living on their own, at some point, as family photography and albums can be a comfort and memory trigger for some used in the right context. For one of our ARC interviews, we spoke to Hackney Archives based in East London, about a collection of family studio photographs they had acquired. The museum ran a project to connect with people and families who were in the photographs and still living in the local area. People they could identify were invited to come and talk about their experience of the photo studio, which was an important fixture of this community among older generations. Organising this kind of outreach work is very important in my opinion in the field of vernacular photography, so discussions are anchored around the subjects of the images and first-person accounts as much as possible.

Regarding the content we put out, we include a note about how to contact us should anyone recognise some of their own family’s images. A few people have got in touch with us and they’ve been happy for us to continue showing their photographs. If they weren’t happy with anything we were doing, we would of course remove the content and return the photos to them, if they wanted them back. Many people aren’t aware how their family photographs and albums got ‘out there’, which is a whole other subject.

What do you think is the most ethical way to showcase family photography as part of an exhibition? 

Rachael Moloney: I think it’s a very delicate area and sensitivity is needed on the part of curators. The number of ‘ownerless’ vernacular images in circulation now is huge and we usually don’t know why or how a set of photographs or albums came to be given away. We can guess, but we rarely know the reasons. As curators and the new custodians of these objects, I think we have a great obligation to present them thoughtfully, acknowledging they were originally created for private viewing.

Nigel Martin Shephard: The best way to show vernacular photography for me would be in a pop-up reference library, in spaces where people could come and sit and look at the images and albums, as the families who created them once did. 

May I ask if you have a favourite vernacular photograph?

Nigel Martin Shephard: There's one that I find really beautiful. It's a colour photograph from the 1980s depicting a wedding. On the right of the frame, one of the children is split down the middle; on the far left of the frame, there's a man walking around the corner also cut in half. But this is what is very touching about the image – the person taking it is concentrating solely on those for whom they have great affection. They’re not thinking about the photograph itself. This exemplifies for me what family photography is about. It's not about the frame, it's not about the art – it's just about the subjects.

Wedding, 1980s, The Family Museum Archive. Photographer unknown

Nigel is an independent filmmaker, artist and composer. His short film Father Figure was screened at the London Film Festival 2011 and he is currently completing a feature-length project, Banners and Broad Arrows, which tells the story of the Suffragette Movement through still images, taken mostly by Suffragettes. Nigel is recognised as an expert in this field and delivered his paper on the subject, Kodak Girls, at the University of Oxford on International Women’s Day in 2013. He has collected the largest archive of photographs taken by Suffragettes in the UK.

Rachael is a writer, editor and curator. She has held numerous senior editorial positions for leading media brands, acted as a creative director for digital content and curated art and design projects. Publications she has worked on and contributed to include Departures, Financial Times, Fjord Review, Nowness, Time Out, Vogue and Wallpaper*. Her passion for photography was sparked at a young age when she discovered the albums of her grandmother, a proud Brownie owner and talented amateur photographer.