5 Generations in One Photo

(Photo: John Owen 92, Gerald Owen 67, Steven Owen 40, Chris Owen 21, Connah Owen 6 months)

My family has a treasured photograph of my eldest daughter's hand, my wife's hand, her mother's hand and her grandmother's hand--four generations of women holding hands.

Julian Germain, a British photographer, has published a similar project. He took photos of families that stretch across 4 to 5 living generations. In an interview with ASX, he explained how a previous project about the span of human life led into this one:

They are a progression from the Face of a Century series I made in 1999. That’s a chronological sequence of 101 portraits beginning with someone who is a hundred years old and ending with my daughter when she was just a few days old. At that particular time I was acutely aware of both life and death experiences and this is one of the ways I dealt with them. You see all kinds of people, all the stages of life; it’s mapped out from the end to the beginning, one individual after another—most of whom I just stopped briefly in the street. It’s a simple piece but it really makes me think about how incredible life is. The Gnerations pictures develop the theme, focusing more on where we all come from as individuals. In the text for Face of the Century, Martin Herron refers to us all being at the apex of a pyramid with our genetic inheritance spreading back behind us generation after generation. I wanted to investigate that.

-via My Modern Met


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Lovely picture, I just wished someone had smiled. Then I noticed the "get well soon" balloon in back. Still, a picture to treasure when you can get everyone together like that. The other photo of the 6 generations was great too.
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So cool. Real families are the best. I just realized when my identical twin Granddaughters were born this year that I may have had contact with relatives that could span 4 centuries. My great grandparents in the late 1800's, parents, myself, and children 1900's-2000's, and granted they live long enough, my twin girls into the early 2100's. Awesome.
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Yep, you can scan across the faces and tell they're all related. The baby will always know what he's going to look like when he's older! Looking through all the pictures, most of them are like that.

We once had a picture of 6 generations.
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