Gender and Generation in the Home Curation of Family Photography

Abstract

Through 30 semistructured interviews of members of 15 couples in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, we analyze how gender, age, and emotional labor play out in the social acts of taking, organizing, and sharing family photographs. We find that the expectation for women to initiate the taking of family photos remains, even if the performance of the task is sometimes done by young fathers. The emotional burden of worrying how to organize an overwhelming number of photographs falls more commonly on women’s shoulders. Mothers and young fathers are more likely than older fathers to make a strong effort to view digital photographs with their children on the computer. But, when the sharing process extends beyond the immediate family to maintain kinship ties, women are more likely to take on the primary responsibility for the actions surrounding the photographs, which is consistent with tenets of intensive mothering.