Opening yesterday at Atlanta Photography Group gallery in Piedmont Heights, “Family Diary 2026” brings together more than 20 photographers working in documentary, archival, and serial modes, each examining how family takes shape.
The exhibition runs through Feb. 27, with an opening reception on Thursday, Feb. 5.
Among the featured photographers is Damien Jackson, whose four images document his grandmother’s funeral. Made at her request, the photos move through the day: a family member holding a funeral program, a casket carried through the congregation, relatives seated together in mourning, and gravediggers preparing the burial site. The stills are a quiet case study in what “Family Diary 2026” seeks to uncover, the ways family reveals itself.
“It was difficult for sure,” Jackson said when asked about shooting such an intimate moment in his family’s story. “But I think that the agency that my grandmother gave me by asking me to do it. With that ask, not only is it agency, but it’s also … I feel a duty to her, right? Because this is the gift she asked me for.”
Shaped by lineage
Jackson is a New York City–based photographer with roots in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, a trained biologist by education, and a professor by profession. He did not come to photography through formal art training. He came to it through family.
His father gave him his first camera years ago to document his children’s lives following a divorce. What began as a way to hold on became something deeper. Photography offered an outlet from the regimented structure of higher education and a language Jackson did not know he had been searching for. Jackson cites photographers such as Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, and Jamel Shabazz as touchstones, artists whose images carry emotional weight without spectacle.
That path—untrained, intuitive, shaped by proximity—still defines his work.
Why ‘Family Diary’ fits
“Family Diary 2026” brings together work made through sustained attention, projects built over time, often without a fixed endpoint. The show highlights how long-term portraiture, studies of domestic space, community documentation, and generational change function as visual diaries. Family, as defined by the exhibition, extends beyond bloodlines to include chosen relationships, shared rituals, inherited responsibilities, and the places where bonds are rehearsed and renewed.
Juried by Jamie M. Allen, Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Curator and Head of the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, the exhibition leans toward work that emerges from close observation and emphasizes continuity, the small, cumulative acts that shape belonging.
Jackson’s photographs align naturally with that approach.
“My portraits are not going to be posed.I prefer those because I think that’s when our ancestors shined through most—when we don’t have our masks up.”
Photographer Damien Jackson
One day, four images
Jackson describes those featured images as a quiet arc.
“The first image is an image of my cousin. You can actually see her face,” he explained. “I cut her torso in two, but it’s a picture of her holding the funeral program. So you’ll have a picture of my grandmother. She’s got two of them. One is actually the front of the program and the other one is the back of the program and the back of the program says, “Let Me Go.” It’s the hymn, “Let Me Go.” And so that kind of introduces you to the series.”
Another photograph shows Jackson’s grandmother’s casket moving through the congregation toward the altar. In a third, two aunts sit facing forward. One wears a veil. The other rests her hand on her sister’s back.
“That’s all you see is her hand and the veil,” Jackson said. “I just love that image because I think that is kind of quintessential support in moments of mourning, but kind of represents how family comes together in moments like this.”
The final image centers the gravediggers.
“There’s an image of the gravediggers, in unison, going about their work of preparing the earth to receive somebody else. And I really love that image too because it speaks so much about the care that’s taken—things that aren’t necessarily paid attention to, but they come to work every single day to make sure that their job is done properly.”
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Photographing without the mask
Jackson’s broader practice centers on documentary work and candid portraiture. He avoids posed images, not out of doctrine, but belief.
“My portraits are not going to be posed,” he said. “I prefer those because I think that’s when our ancestors shined through most when we don’t have our masks up.”
As a result, his images capture moments of joy, pain, relief, and grief, when people are not managing how they appear. Jackson’s subjects often tell him they recognize someone familiar in their portraits, a grandparent, a parent–sometimes their younger selves
“I think that’s when we get a chance to see who we are, who we were, and then possibly who we’re gonna be,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of trust that people give you when you’re taking pictures of them. So I try to handle that with care.”
That care is visible in the work on view at APG. These photographs do not explain themselves. They hold space. They remember.
