Switch genders and don’t tidy up! How to make a modern family portrait
J J Levine’s Alone Time 19, taken in 2021, appears to be a conventional portrait of a traditional nuclear family: mother, father, two children, all gathered in a living room. We know the little girl is a little girl because she’s in a floral dress and has a pink bow plonked on her head. The little boy wears blue jeans and a backwards baseball cap. Look closer, though, and you begin to see a resemblance between not just the kids but also their parents who (despite different hairstyles, clothes and poses) share the same features and build. In the series Alone Time, Montréal-based artist Levine creates images of couples – and in this case a couple and their kids – with one model playing both sides of the couple, upending the idea that gender is fixed.
“There’s a tension in all my work between reality and fiction,” says Levine, who produces carefully constructed photographic portraits of parents and children, lovers and friends. Even the works in his Queer Portraits series, which show real people from the queer and trans community, are carefully staged. The choice of setting and props can be about the sitter’s personality, as in grand historical portraits, or it can be about colour, pattern and composition. “What’s interesting,” he says, “is that someone might see this particular image and think it’s the most real of all the families I’ve photographed, even though it’s completely made up.”
Levine is one of 64 artists included in Real Families: Stories of Change, a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in collaboration with the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge. Curated by the former director of the centre, psychologist Susan Golombok, the show explores modern family forms as depicted by artists primarily over the past 50 years. According to Golombok, it was in the mid-1970s that the configurations began to shift in earnest, partly because of the increase in separations and divorce, and partly because of the introduction of reproductive technologies. Since then, changes in social attitudes and scientific advances have made room for gay fathers, lesbian mothers and single parents by choice, all of whom (and more) are seen on the Fitzwilliam’s walls.
Today’s portrait artists are exploring interiority, family dynamics – even charting their own journey
But what makes a family portrait? According to Alison Smith, chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery, the answer is simple: it’s something that says “we are a family”. Symbolic images of succession and ancestry can be dated back to the ancient Egyptians, but it was in the 16th and 17th centuries that representational images of recognisable sitters emerged. With urbanisation and the development of the middle classes came a flourishing art market, which created a demand for portraits that signified rank, alliances and wealth.
A handful of historical portraits are included in the exhibition, including Sir Joshua Reynolds’ The Braddyll Family (1789), which shows father and son, as well as dutiful wife and dog (the three daughters don’t appear since they were unable to inherit). “Often these early portraits were social signifiers,” says Smith. “And while similar portraits are commissioned today, often by well-established families, artists are also independently exploring interiority, family dynamics – even charting their own journey.”
Joy Labinjo’s foray into portrait painting began with her own family. During her final year at Newcastle University, she had a desire to paint Black people but no access to models beside herself and one or two friends. “I went home for the Easter holidays and brought a family photo album back with me, not knowing what I would use it for,” she says. She then began to lift the figures from the photographs and combine them with patterns and backgrounds from other sources. “That was how I found my voice.”
As well as exploring her own lived experience as a British Nigerian, Labinjo’s portraits capture those moments that we can all relate to, no matter our heritage: eating breakfast, lounging on the sofa, all sorts of celebrating. With works such as Having the Conversation (2020), which shows a granddaughter in her grandmother’s lap, she also holds up a mirror to society. “I made it during the pandemic, just after George Floyd was killed,” she says. “I was thinking about race and what it means to be Black in a majority-white country, and the idea came to me. Most people of colour have ‘the conversation’ with a parent or a grandparent or an uncle at some point in their life. I wanted to paint a gentle, loving family scene; if it weren’t for the title, it would be just that.”
The artists capture unfiltered family life: the joy and affection but also the tension, hostility and estrangement
Caroline Walker, too, uses the personal to say something universal. After completing a series of paintings and drawings in the maternity wing at UCLH in 2021, she chose to make a series about a new mother’s next steps. “When you’re pregnant, so much emphasis is put on labour and birth, and very little is said about what happens when you leave the hospital,” she says. “I wanted to show a more subjective view of the transition into motherhood and the domestic space in which so much of this time is spent.”
While art history is full of images of motherhood, Walker feels that they’re often simplistic, “idealised or romantic rather than reflecting the reality of the day-to-day experience”. With her series Lisa (2022), which shows her sister-in-law over a period of four months, she explores what motherhood looks like now, with all the clutter that accompanies it. Babygrows loll out of open drawers. Half-drunk glasses of orange squash collect on a coffee table. “If some of the historical portrayals of this subject were timeless, I want mine to be the opposite, showing the reality of life with a baby at a specific moment in time.”
Which is what she and her fellow artists in Real Families do so well: capture unfiltered the nature and quality of family life, dynamics and transitions. The joy and affection, but also the tension, hostility and estrangement. Both Golombok and Smith point out that historical portraits are in many ways a front, behind which lurks a whole load of dysfunction. Artists today are teasing that out.
Among the best is Chantal Joffe, who remembers realising while she was studying at the Royal College of Art in the early 1990s not only that she could paint her parents, but that it was a good way of contemplating her relationship with them. Ever since, she has committed herself and the rest of her family to canvas again and again. “Through painting I’m always trying to conjure the complexity of those relationships, the push and pull, the desire for closeness and at the same time the rejection of it,” she says. “By painting my own family, I guess in a weird way I’m also trying to get enough distance to breathe – because that’s families, isn’t it? If I can make a picture of them, I’m not going to be completely consumed.”
When Joffe became a mother, she too found herself wanting to describe how it felt: the physicality, the intensity, the ambivalence. “I was trying to channel with those early paintings of [her daughter] Esme how hard it was for me, becoming a mum, and the complexity of me as a painter, what that meant,” she says. The exhibition concludes with 10 of her portraits, one of which, Mother and Child II (2005), shows the artist leaning over her tiny daughter. Joffe is nude, her dark hair falling forwards over her shoulders, her eyes – equally dark – wildly wide. “I look a bit deranged, I think, because I was trying to show more honestly how it felt to be me.”
Like Joffe, JJ Levine has spent his creative life compiling an archive of family portraits by photographing the same people over extended periods. Also included in Real Families are three intimate images that show the artist, his former partner Harry, and their daughter Joah. Among the most powerful is Harry Pregnant (2015), a portrait of a transgender man surrounded by house plants, cradling his swelling belly. When I ask Levine how he feels about them going on display, he tells me that although he’s pleased, at first the selection gave him pause. “Because really, these are linked to what other people might understand as my family,” he says. “Of course, my child is my family – there’s no question about that. But so is my best friend’s kid, and so are my friends. For me, the word ‘family’ refers to my friends, my community.”
Collection: Family Portraits
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Family Portraits: The Collection
On this page you will find our collection of design ideas for family portraits. Here we have dozens of templates of different settings: there are renaissance family portraits, modern family portraits, medieval family portraits, regal family portraits, and many other themes. Our service of turning photos into family portraits is available for all of the designs below. We have several printing options available for the family canvases. The most popular option for portraits of families is the canvas wrap with a wooden inside frame. Such wraps perfectly fit modern interiors and we have several size options available. Another option for portraits of faces of a family is to print it on a small easel back canvas that is ideal for table display. The last option for a personalized family canvas is to print it on a 24×36 poster. To order a portrait of a family, select one of the design templates below, configure the printing settings and upload your photographs. You can also see the examples and the printing options available for specific design templates on their separate pages. Feel free to visit them by clicking on the previews of the templates you like.
Features
For custom family portraits, we have several great features available free of charge. First of all, there is a design approval procedure. Once you send the photographs for the family portrait, we start creating the digital artwork. Before the family photos are printed on canvas, we send you this digital draft for approval. Another feature we are proud of is the unlimited revisions and corrections. At the approval stage, you can either approve the family canvas or request corrections. The number of such revisions is unlimited for you to have exactly the family canvas portrait you want. Last but not least, we have a money back guarantee for family canvas paintings at the approval stage. For example, if you order the royal family portrait and don’t like the draft we send, you are free to ask for a refund. The whole procedure is designed for you to either be satisfied with the result or get your money back.
Free Shipping
For family photos on canvas we have free shipping to the USA. The shipping prices for other countries are calculated individually and depend on the selected canvas size and destination. The portraits are safely shipped according to our highest standards and you needn’t worry about the canvas being damaged. Feel free to check the examples of our artwork delivered safe and sound on the pages of design templates. There are also customers’ reviews available on our website, where you can ensure the quality of delivery and see more examples of canvas prints. When you commission a portrait of a family printed on canvas, we also send you the digital artwork for free. This artwork will be delivered as soon as the design is approved and finished, and will be ready for self-printing right away. Such artwork is also perfectly suitable for printing on cups, shirts, bags and many other accessories. In case the shipping conditions don’t suit you, there is always an option to order only the digital version.
The New Modern Family Portrait
My family and I are spending a lot more time at home lately, as most people are during these times, and it’s given us some time to do some redecorating, planning, and photographing our new modern family portrait.
We did some painting, got some new furniture and I really wanted to change up what we had on our walls. Specifically, we have this one wall in our house that is pretty big and we never know what to do with it. It originally painted a grey color and we’ve had several versions or collage walls on it over the years but none of them ever were what I totally wanted to do with it. When we recently painted it white I looked at the wall and knew right away that I wanted to try to make it look like a gallery wall in a museum or art studio, which meant going big.
The problem I found with going big was that it’s a big commitment too. On our old collage wall we had a lot of 8×10’s and the occasional 11×14, and it was easy to swap out prints pretty regularly. Going with bigger prints is a bit more of a commitment, but I knew that’s what I wanted. I really wanted that art gallery wall feel.
I’m a big fan of taking pictures of my family and since this is for our family living space I knew it had to be of all of us. So I tried several photos of each of us and mocked up the gallery wall on my computer but couldn’t commit to one. Whether it was a staged portrait or a candid shot nothing felt right or like it was a piece of art. I wanted it to be us, but I wanted to make art that could go on anyone’s wall (at least in theory).
We ultimately decided to try to go with a pop-art feel and I went back and forth on what I wanted and how to do it.
A photographer I’m a big fan of, Tyler Shields who did a photo of a girl drinking out of a Chanel bottle, and I remembered seeing that several years ago and thinking, “this would be the perfect shot for my wife.” She loves all things fashion and beauty and together we run a fashion blog The Weekender Fashion. So I knew that would be a good one for her but what about the rest of us? I was pretty simple, I’ve had lots of hobbies and interests over the years but photography has been with me for most of my life so I knew I wanted a camera in my shot.
The kids were a little more challenging. When you are young you have so many interests and they change on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis. I knew I wanted them to represent what the kids love and will last a while. My wife bought the video game controller for our son, we threw around different ideas like legos or soccer but ultimately I knew he’s a gamer and that’s what would best represent his personality.
For our daughter, we quickly decided on the ballet flats with the Chanel logo since her Name is Coco and it tied it back to Jess’s Chanel photo since she’s basically a mini-me to my wife and she loves to dance and perform.
Shooting these was the easy part. We did this all in the same room they are currently hanging. It was three lights and a light pink background. I used one strobe with a big parabolic umbrella overhead, a strobe with a diffusion panel camera right, and the last strobe straight on from above the camera with a beauty dish.
The main lighting comes from the overhead and sidelight and the beauty dish was set really low to just fill in the shadows. I knew I wanted everything to be tack sharp so I put the camera on a tripod and was at f/8.0. I tend to add grain to most of my photos, but I knew for editing I wanted them as clean as possible. I also knew I wanted the photos to fill the image as much as possible so to minimize any distortion I went with my longer lens and shot the whole series on my 70-200. The focal ranges are all different, but they all fell between 100mm and 200mm. In the end, I only ended up firing around 20-30 frames per person before I felt like I got it.
Photoshop was relatively simple on these as well. The lighting is what gave them most of the look. But playing with color and dodging a burning really made them pop. After basic clean up/retouching, I spent a lot of time on dodging and burning, zooming in to each little detail and dodging all the highlights to make them pop. After that it was a matter of playing with color. I love the soft pastel colors and with our new house decor I knew that would be the way to go. So after I played with the color balance tool a little bit I used one of my favorite plug-ins that I’ve had for years. The NIK Color Effect Pro and used their cross processing filter and then tweaked the opacity to lessen the effect to fit my taste.
Once they were all edited came time to print them. I had originally thought I would do framed prints. I knew I wanted them big to fill the wall so I started searching the Printique website for their various frame options. They had a lot that would have probably looked really nice, but I just kept thinking to myself that I wanted this to look like a modern family portrait art gallery So I looked around the site at different options. First I saw the metal prints and thought that could be cool but as soon as I came across the acrylic prints I knew right away that’s what I needed to have. I love how they float on the wall and the gold mounting posts just look so nice and make the prints extra special. They truly look like works of art on our wall.
From the time I ordered them online to being hung on my wall was about a week which seemed crazy fast to me. They were shipped within 3 days of ordering and arrived a couple of days after that in 2 boxes. The physical hanging process was super easy. The hard part was measuring and planning for the hanging. Once we decided on the right height it went smooth. We ended up getting the 24×36 inch prints which I recommend is a two-person job, but if I had smaller acrylic prints I’m confident I could have done it by myself.
Since it comes with holes for the mounting posts you basically just hold the print on the wall where you want it, level it, and mark the holes and then drill. Simple as that. Having multiples and on a large scale makes it a bit slower because you have to measure everything so they line up perfectly. But it’s just a matter of taking your time.
We love the way these turned out in our house and are so excited to show them off to our friends and family when they come to visit. They elevate the look of our house and truly transport you to a high-end art gallery. I finally got the gallery wall of my dreams all thanks to Printique. And am excited about enjoying it for years to come and hope to pass them along to the kids as they grow up to keep as family heirlooms.
Robert Wagner is a Commercial Photographer and Videographer, based out of Toledo, Ohio. He specializes in creative portraiture and stylized retouching.
