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Photo  Credit:  Anthony Almeida

"The  First Marriage" by Jodi Kandor, The New York Times Magazine

Last Sunday the New York Times Magazine ran an extended piece on Barack and Michelle Obama's relationship titled, "The First Marriage."  The article examines the couple's negotiation of their private relationship in the public eye and considers how the presidential couple and the presidential family are expected to conform to a set of proscribed roles and the ways in which the Obamas are challenging those norms.  Accompanying the article is an extended photo-essay culled from several moments since the Obamas married in 1992.  The images are arrayed in chronological order--many are candid snapshots of the first family at milestone moments on "the road to the White House" and are captioned accordingly.  This photo-essay that mimics the form of a family photo-album provides an opportunity for thinking through the intersections of photography and the family, of the private and public, of marriage and politics.

Both the text of this article and the images consider the public nature of a presidential relationship and the branding of the Obamas as a couple.  The image on the cover of the magazine (above) suggests that the viewer has access to a behind-the-scenes look at the couple as they gaze at each other (oblivious to the viewer's gaze) and wander off stage and toward the camera after a public event.  The photograph that begins the article, however, includes at its center an image of the embracing Obamas displayed on a massive television screen flanked by several large advertisements and looked upon by a large crowd.  Here we have both the private voyeuristic look into their marriage that the article promises along with the recognition that this is a relationship that exists in the broader public sphere.

Today at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association I attended a panel titled "The Cool of Barack Obama" at which Nghana Lewis presented a paper considering the ways in which Barack and Michelle Obama redefine and represent black love.  Lewis placed Barack and Michelle Obama within a long trajectory of representations of black heterosexual relationships arguing that the Obamas both work within and challenge cultural representations of black love.  Although Lewis did not explicitly consider Jodi Kandor's recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, many of her arguments might easily extend to this First Family Photo Album.  Marianne Hirsch argues that the family photo-album is a collection of choreographed and staged images that "position family members in relation to one another and to the 'familial gaze'--the conventions and ideologies through which [members] see themselves" (Hirsch, The Familial Gaze).  Certainly we can see Barack, Michelle, Sasha, Malia positioned in relation to one another in ways that both uphold and undermine normative representations of the American family.  How, then, does this First Family Album position us in relation to the First Family?  How do these images of the First Family suggest that we should construct our own families?