The School of Life: On Family - Friday 3rd May
What's better than launching THE most beautiful and poignant book? Well launching just such a book that happens to be full of locals (including yours truly!). I joined local photographer Katie Peters on her journey to create the latest School of Life publication, 'On Family'. Our area is a melting pot of old families, new families, young families, chosen families and all other forms of family. This gorgeous new book, in the form of photos and interviews, plots the pressures and joys of family. Please join us for this super special event, a chance to not only explore family and what it means to us, but to meet and celebrate those featured from our wonderful Waltham Forest!
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As Tolstoy once wrote, ‘happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Each of us carries a picture in our heads of what such a ‘normal, happy’ family ought to look like…one that may be sharply at odds with our own. Yet when it comes to families, there is no such thing as normal; whether happy or unhappy – and most are a mixture of both – the only constant is uniqueness and oddity.
On Family, the latest book from The School of Life, is a different kind of family album; a collection of portraits and interviews with 60 different families of all stripes. We meet new parents; stepchildren; siblings; the wealthy and the marginalised; the old and the young. Its purpose is to broaden our image of what other families are actually like, and to provide us with the wisdom and perspective to better understand – and come to terms with – our own.
To celebrate the launch of On Family, we’ll be hosting an evening of conversation around its key themes and ideas. Following a discussion with the photographer Kate Peters about her experience with the project, you’ll be invited to debate some of the questions raised in the book with others. Is there such a thing as a ‘happy’ family? How do our caregivers shape the ways we see the world? And do all our problems really come down to childhood?
Join us on Friday 3rd May for a conversation about families: what we imagine they ought to look like – and how ours have shaped the person we are today.