Family Records - Joseph Vitone

These photographs have been drawn from an ongoing series called Family Records which was begun in 1998 to document members of immediate and extended families of the photographer and his wife. The majority of the portrait subjects live in or near Akron, Ohio, former home to the country’s major rubber and tire producers. Akron and rural communities neighboring Akron are the locations for these images. The photographs generate dialogues between one another at a number of levels, some directly, as in lineage and interpersonal relation of mother to daughter, father to son, or brother to sister, and some at less specific and more universal places as well. Comment is made on time and aging, on moving from childhood to adulthood, on relations sustained or lost through the years, on masculinity and femininity, on sensuality and beauty seen not only in youth but in age, and on our valuing of ourselves and others not only because of our strengths but, perhaps even more so, by reason of our vulnerabilities.