Family Focus (1976)

Emshwiller terms Family Focus a family selfportrait a stylized autobiography which takes the form of an intimate collage of home movies blackandwhite videotape and photographs that have been colorized synthesized or otherwise visually transformed in an electronic mediation by the artist The viewer is witness to the spontaneous activities and conversations of the familys quotidian home life which is accompanied by Carol Emshwillers ironic often poetic commentary In one sequence of home movies the children are seen growing over a span of twenty years Using the video camera as a kind of psychological mirror Emshwiller integrates videos intimacy reflexivity and realism with its unreal technological manipulations to form what the artist describes as a documentaryvideo art transformation of selfrevealing images