“Look at us! So loving, so happy, so normal.” That has been the basic message of family photography for decades. Today’s families may strike more informal poses than their Victorian counterparts and assemble their images on digital walls rather than in physical albums, but the domestic photograph is still, largely, a tool for self-promotion.

In researching our book, my co-author Stephen McLaren and I were looking for exceptions to this rule. We had no interest in assembling a collection of idyllic family portraits because real families aren’t often idyllic. They come together, but they also fall apart. They love and protect their different members, but they also reject and confine them. Families are containers for loyalty and cruelty, altruism and selfishness – in short, for all our best and worst characteristics.

Our book cuts through the glut of smiling snapshots and tightly choreographed nuclear units to show how that photography can be so much more than a tool for just advertising domestic bliss.

You can read an article I wrote about the experience of making the book here.