The Flowers Family (Los Flores y las flores in Spanish), photographed by Argentinian photographer Cecilia Reynoso is a non-narrative project about her husband’s extended family. According to the family tradition, they often come together for dinners and parties. These intimate and personal photographs by Cecilia Reynoso show the love and tenderness between the family members. “We gather at lunch on Sundays. These Argentinian lunches last forever, like three to five hours. We all sit at the table, and the food comes and comes.”

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The idea to start the family project came naturally to Cecilia Reynoso. Her boyfriend introduced her to his family, counting at least eighteen members. Coming from a small family herself, she found it fascinating to be with such a large family. “It was overwhelming. But as I was studying cinema, I started shooting them and making small short audiovisuals with them, especially with the younger part of the families. So, that's when they caught my visual attention. Later came photography. I started taking photos of them to make a photo album to give them. And then somehow something happened. Colours appeared. The house is very colourful. It looks like a set with green walls or blue walls. When I downloaded the pictures, I saw things very differently. The characters like my brother-in-law and my mother-in-law were special and photogenic.”

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Emotions

Cecilia Reynoso kept photographing the family for over ten years without a conceptual story. She did not want to give information about the particular family but to show what family life looks like and which emotions it reveals. “Although people want to know what members of the family do, I'm more interested in other things. Like an emotion, an energy that the photograph can produce in the viewer.”

One might expect that the family members were not over-enthusiastic to be photographed extensively, but happily, Reynoso did not meet an adversary attitude towards photography, although there were restrictions. “My mother-in-law is delighted to be photographed, but not my sister-in-law. She was very protective of her children. And when the photographs began to be seen and published in some spaces, she didn't like it. But as we have a good relation, we talk and we negotiate. I could show a limited quantity of pictures, but I wanted to keep photographing them. So, I said, okay, let's do it this way.”
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Changes over time

Browsing in her archive Reynoso sees changes over time as with all families. There were divorces, deaths and births and new partners. “My sister-in-law and my brother-in-law got divorced. They both have new partners now. My brother-in-law, 40, has a 20-year-old girlfriend. She's beautiful, has this pink hair and is full of tattoos. Of course, I love to photograph her.”

The changes in the enormous family make the project continuously enjoyable as if it is an ongoing theatre. “I don't want to finish this work because it's a large family, and they have a strong bond. My family and many families in the world are falling apart. Lots of families don't bother so much anymore. They're not together in meals. Maybe they meet two times a year with Christmas or something.”
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Extended family

Extended families are a remnant of the last century, as Susan Sontag wrote in her book On Photography. Could The Flowers Family project be seen as an antidote to the disintegration of family life? “In this big family, you have a sense of belonging to a community. Of course, there are issues inside the family. That's normal, like every family, but they have a strong bond because they function like a clan. I have one photograph that shows the atmosphere of an extended family. In this photograph, the grandfather lies on his deathbed, and the family is around his bed saying goodbye. That moment was timeless. It felt like in the 18th century. He said his last words, and he died, and we were all there. So, it was extraordinary and very intense. A compelling moment.”
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Luchino Visconti

In her family project, the Italian film director Luchino Visconti, whose work revolves around family life and beauty and death, has influenced Cecilia Reynoso. “I felt that the situations I was in resembled his movies, which were a big inspiration for me. The amazing film Rocco and His Brothers (1960) was about a family. The table scenes where they're all gathered around the table fascinated me. I could see that I had that kind of scenery during the family gatherings in Argentina. My husband’s family is partly of Italian origin.”
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Family of man

In the 1950s, Steichen organised the famous exhibition the Family of Man, in which humanity was presented as one big family. The project The Flowers Family does, in fact, the opposite. It shows one family that could be seen as a metaphor for the world’s population, even if the spectator would not recognize his own situation in it. For Reynoso, it is not important what exactly people would see in her pictures as long as they can relate to them. “A woman once told me she was abandoned as a child. And when she saw these pictures, they made a great impact on her because she never had this. So, I'm more interested in that kind of reaction than making a fixed statement about family. That's why I give little information about who they are and what they do.”

Cecilia Reynoso (1980) was born in Buenos Aires. She studied Dirección Cinematográfica and Dirección Cinematográfica at Universidad del Cine. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.

https://www.ceciliareynoso.com