Grandma grabbing Grandpa’s tush, 2000

“My grandfather would regularly grab my grandma’s breasts and yell, ‘The family jewels!’ Here she is having her turn—with his behind in the bathing suit she picked out for him. (She picked out all his clothes, and he never rejected her choices.)” —Gillian Laub Aperture is pleased to release this special limited-edition print by Gillian Laub from her series Family Matters. In this body of work, Laub’s photographs of her family through the past twenty years explore the ways society’s biggest questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships. Family Matters zeroes in on the artist’s family as an example of the way Donald Trump’s knack for sowing discord and division has impacted communities, individuals, and households across the country. As Laub explains, “I began to unpack my relationship to my relatives—which turned out to be much more indicative of my relationship to the outside world than I had ever thought, and the key to exploring questions I had about the effects of wealth, vanity, childhood, aging, fragility, political conflict, religious traditions, and mortality.” Family Matters reveals Laub’s willingness to confront ideas of privilege and unity, and to expose the fault lines and vulnerabilities of her relatives and herself. Ultimately, Family Matters celebrates the resiliency and power of family—including the family we choose—in the face of divisive rhetoric. In doing so, it holds up a highly personalized mirror to the social and political divides in the United States today.

Pigment Print
Paper Size: 11 x 14 inches
Edition of 20 + 3 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Gillian Laub (b. 1975, Chappaqua, New York) is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. She received a Bachelors in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, before studying photography at the International Center of Photography, New York. Her works include the book, Testimony (Aperture, 2007), and the book and HBO film, Southern Rites (2015). Laub received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2019.