To celebrate the fifth anniversary of our quarterly magazine, EXIT #20 Family dedicates this issue to the seemingly common and conciliatory theme of the family. However, its pages reveal the diverse manifestations of the subject, presented from an artistic and photographic viewpoint; representations in line with a fractured view and rethinking of the concept of family in today’s society. A natural and sociological entity, organized biologically, historically and socially with its group of characters and stories; the family when viewed through the artist’s lens, becomes a subject that is both educational and fun; a space of life experiences that represent warmth, wellbeing and fraternal love but also socioeconomic criticism, the grotesque and para-Freudian. Genealogies and family scenes are brought together for all to see in this edition of EXIT, which has just reached its fifth year of existence.

Happy Family is the title of the opening editorial by Rosa Olivares; a title that expresses more a desire than a real possibility of finding happiness at the heart of the family.  In her article Ghost Worlds: Photography and the Family, the prestigious author and exhibition curator, Val Williams, analyses the relationship between family and photography; an association which has developed since the very beginnings of photography and is still present today, in its many guises.

Marta Gili poses the question of what can be understood as family today and draws a map of the variations, changes and overarching situations that define a wide and changing idea of the family, in a society attempting to redefine its myths. 

Six artists form the backbone of the magazine with their respective portfolios. In these collections, each one different, we find everything from upper class families - New Yorkers and European - captured by Tina Barney, to the decline of the American dream personified in Mitch Epstein’s Family Business series. British photographer, Richard Billingham brings a squalid aesthetic through the snapshots of his parents, whilst a warmer more sociological outlook is presented by the Argentines Sebastián Friedman and Oriana Eliçabe. The former Argentinian shows family portrait diptychs of employer and employed families in his series The Family and The Maid and the latter, in her project Lesbian Mothers, depicts new models of family life and maternity. Finally, Spanish photographer Enrique Marty invades the intimacy of his family with his Polaroids, transmitting the air of a grotesque soap opera.

In addition, other artists, some established and others newer or practically unknown, provide different visions of the collective portrait of the family and its thousand and one faces: Darren Almond, Mario de Ayguavives, Norbert Becwar, Mira Bernabeu, Tatiana Donoso, Elliott Erwitt, Valie Export, Weng Fen, Jim Goldberg, Barbara Kruger, Sally Mann, Yurie Nagashima, Nicholas Nixon, Bill Owens, Aldo Sodoma, Angela Strassheim, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Larry Sultan and Ana Torralva. This issue offers an artistic genealogy that takes us through the different reincarnations of the concept of the family to its representation in the current day.