Someone yawning, a baby with a blurred face, weddings, jazz clubs, caravan holidays and a child in a kilt with their face obscured by the photographer’s finger. These are just a handful of the submissions made by members of the public to an online archive managed by GRAIN Projects. Developed as an open call repository, the GENERATIONS Archive forms part of the wider GENERATIONS programme that focuses on a series of newly commissioned four and five direct line generation family portraits by Julian Germain which are exhibited across public locations in Birmingham and neighbouring Sandwell this summer. GENERATIONS Archive is a newly formed archive drawn from multiple other family archives. It is reflective of the families and friendships of people across the West Midlands region, the images they hold in significance and the ways that these document both ordinary and extraordinary moments in their recent lives and older histories.

GENERATIONS Archive, accessible via GRAIN Projects’ website, contains a broad mixture of professionally shot images of events, professional studio portraits of individuals or groups and numerous more informally taken ‘amateur’ photographs. Many older photographs are creased, foxed and scuffed, embodying traces of their and their subject’s histories. Others contain people who are not named or mentioned, perhaps friends, colleagues, passing acquaintances or strangers. A brief caption for each image provides clues when it is clicked: names, dates, some context of event or location. While many captions are perfunctory, other descriptions offer fascinating, moving backstories, from a photograph taken in 2021 captioned ‘Me – Rachel, my husband Ben and our daughter Lorelei. On the ‘train’ at Cannon Hill Park, eating ice cream, light relief as a family during my cancer treatment’ to another from circa 1978, in which part of the caption reads ‘Me and my younger sister. Taken while under social services care. I only have 8 photographs of my childhood’. What GENERATIONS Archive holds, then, is a series of stories connected to real lives lived. It offers personal encounters with strangers: with images and stories that remind us of our own selves or of others that we know and love. Family photographs have historically been taken, developed and kept safe in albums and boxes for the benefit of family and close friends. Offering recent or historic photographs up for public consumption or exhibition online here is quite a different premise, however, and speaks to ideas of legacy, public visibility and, in the case of this project, more altruistically to a wider community archive conversation.

GRAIN Projects’ archive can  be found here, with an option to submit your own images.

Last year, photographer and writer Lewis Bush wrote in article for Frieze that archives contain the capacity to wield power and to challenge power: ‘Firstly’ he notes ‘through their ability to redress the historical record, by accounting for those who lived with little power or visibility, but whose presence remains, almost by accident, trapped in archives like insects in amber. Secondly, archives challenge power because, seen openly and critically, they offer a chance to look inside – and bring some accountability to – the cultures that created them’. A criticism of Julian Germain’s GENERATIONS project and indeed the family unit more generally speaking, is the potentially reductive definition of what a family should or could comprise. GRAIN Projects have supported the development of three additional projects that extend and further explore associated themes of family, friendship and community through an open call bursary process. One of these projects is My Chosen Family, part of the T’s & Q’s Archive, a project that chronicles life for people within the Trans and Queer communities in Birmingham and beyond. For this, photographer Mx_Neffy has released an open call asking for members of the LGBTQIA+ community to participate in portrait sessions at a location of their choosing with the people that they choose as family. It is ongoing at the time of writing and expands limiting definitions, opening up terms such as ‘mother’ or ‘sibling’ to a greater range of intersectional possibilities than have often been considered, and tracing multiple and complex webs of connections between people.

GENERATIONS Archive and My Chosen Family are rooted in the local while looking outwards to other places nationally (Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Canterbury) and internationally (Jamaica, Singapore, China, Ireland). The context for both, as well as Germain’s GENERATIONS portraits, is the Birmingham 2022 Festival, a large-scale cultural events and exhibitions programme designed to coincide with the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. A kind of mapping of Birmingham and the wider West Midlands region is taking place though GENERATIONS Archive and My Chosen Family and this is significant in the Commonwealth context, looking toward ideas around the migration of people and ideas, labour and industry as potentially distinct from other parts of the UK. The cultural diversity of archives are considered throughout each of these projects while the Birmingham 2022 Festival’s overriding ‘celebratory’ outlook is addressed with more nuance in these complex projects that also pay heed to the problematic nature of archives and, indeed, families. We find meaning in comparison between our own photographs of blood family or chosen family and the photographs in these new archives. We find new meaning by making connections between the images we see assembled, between those that appear together on billboards or posters, and between those that sit side by side as we scroll and click through family stories generously offered to us.