Mijn Mensen: A Familial Family Portrait

Can a family portrait be truly familial? Mijn Mensen: A Familial Family Portrait is a photographic project that proposes an alternative to traditional family portraiture. Rather than depicting relatives together in the frame, the work explores how the familial gaze can be part of the making of a protrait. Six portraits of my daughter are each shaped by a different family member who stands beside the camera when the photograph was made. Their influence is perceptible only through her expressions and the accompanying names.

Developed within my doctoral artistic research project The Situative Portrait, the work extends a practice-based inquiry into portraiture as a situative, relational act rather than a tool of identification. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s familial gaze and Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the portrait as ‘ex-position,’ Mijn Mensen: A Familial Family Portrait shifts the focus from the portrait as an end result to the social situation of its creation. It invite the spectator not just to look at the portrait, but to look with it.

The work was exhibited in Est-Art in Leiden, november 2025 and part of the symposium Absence as Strategy in Contemporary Art at LUCAS, Leiden. 

Mijn Mensen: A Familial Family Portrait, 2025. 6 photographs, 6 names Archival Pigment Print, 40 x 50 cm / 15,75 x 19,69 inch