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© Stefan Frank
The Photobook Show

Family Albums

episode 2

Thu, May 12, 2022 at 2pm (ET)
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Of all the photobooks you may encounter in your life, the family album is the first and by far the most intimate. One might say that the impulse to hold on to these memories and search through lost time is a driving factor behind many photobooks. In this episode, we’ll look at examples of how artists have translated this impulse into their work:

  • Diane Arbus’s Family Albums, which examines contact sheets from several of her portrait sessions, including one with a New York family in 1969
  • an actual family album — found in a flea market — from an unknown photographer
  • Masahisa Fukase’s Family — a look at his own family

Watch the recording of this episode


Stefan Frank

Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.

Stefan teaches the poetics of space, nighttime photography, and much more — including presenting The Photobook Show — for StrudelmediaLive.