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This new work by Armando Silva is almost certainly the first psychoanalytic study of the family photo album. It also confirms Silva's ability to find subjects of effective academic inquiry in unusual cultural places, as shown by his two previous works, which focused on urban imaginaries and graffiti (Graffiti: una ciudad imaginada and Imaginarios urbanos ). Silvas work on the family album as a cultural, visual, and narrative artifact is of particular interest to psychoanalysis, not only because of the study's numerous points of intersection with Lacan (and others) over matters of semiology, but also because of its focus on the album as a real object with a crucial role in the reproduction of the family as a historical and cultural subject. Rather than applying psychoanalytic and semiological theory to the photo album, however, Silva does his own thing in El album familiar, his study has a generative effect and a distinctly literary quality which merits consideration on its own terms. The importance of his work is bound to be felt in a number of areas, from studies of visual signification to discussions of the future of me family at the threshold of Postmodernity.
Despite its consistent focus on the family photo album, Silvas book has a scope wider than its object—or, better put, its scope continually widens outward from its object. El album familiar is really several books contained within a single extended reflection on the photo album: a history of photography; an inquiry into how visual signs achieve a signifying effect (Silva argues against the notion that the enunciation is produced only by natural language); a prophetic, and often personalized (but not overtly ideological), defense of the family in the face of contemporary social, electronic, and commercial trends which threaten its survival; a history of Colombia (and also of Western modernity itself) through representational trends in photography and the photo album; and, finally, a full-blown research analy