Here is a collection of several quotes that I found interesting and/or useful from Reiakvam's article on the practice of family photography:

"In other words, a photograph is, at the same time, a technically conditioned picture of 'reality' and a culturally conditioned pictorial reality. In spite of the 'evidential force' of the photograph (Bartbes,Camera) giving the impression of directly confronting reality, in the encounter with a photograph one should bear in mind that it is, nevertheless, a visual expression among other visual expressions, an interpretation of reality and, consequently, an inventor of its own reality. The message of this dual expression is moreover, in principle, ambiguous. The quick incision in the axis of time, that the photographic preservation of the second implies, creates discontinuity. The images are not responsible for 'before' or 'after' the constitutive moment of the photographic event. They are removed from the historical continuum and disconnected from time, while meaning is created as a process in time. Or as John Berger has phrased it: 'When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future' (Bartbes,Camera 89)." (Reiakvam 40)

Bartiles, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard and Jonathan Cape. London: Hill & Wang,1982.

"In approaching photography analytically, we find that it concerns neither a pictorial language with inherent semantic codes, nor the technically conditioned, self-generated fragments of reality. Photography must be seen as:

... an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. That is, the meaning of any photographic message is necessarily context-determined. (Sekula 85)" (Reiakvam 40)

Sekula, Allan. "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning." Thinking Photography. Ed. V. Burgin. London: Macmillan, 1987.

"The selection of moments which can be photographed is a function of socio-cultural conditions..." (Reiakvam 42)

"The taboo areas of work, hygiene, sex life, impurity and disorder are excluded from the picture frame as a non-photographic motif. The cultural markers are fixed; inside the frames harmony, order and respectability prevail." (Reiakvam 43)

"Photographic practice functions as a vehicle for experience, as a ritual aid to create order and system in time and space, and as evidence that the journey has taken place." (Reiakvam 54)

SOURCE:

Reiakvam, Oddlaug. "Reframing the Family Photograph." Journal of Popular Culture 26.4 (1994): 39-67. Print.