The series consists of color photographs of interiors, landscapes, gardens and people photographed in Norway, Sweden, Italy, Canary Islands and the U.S. All the pictures have a relation to the artist’s family and, like in a family album, the photographs―despite their diversity―are held together by one person’s point of view. Similar to her earlier projects, Norske Galehus (2000) and Himmelrike (2003), we are confronted with a coupling of a detached photographic gaze and an emotional theme. 

Familiegrafier thematizes the way in which we are unavoidably excluded from the close family context in which the photographs are conceived. This is a parallel to observing other people’s private family photos, where it is often difficult to see beyond the surface of the picture. However, this does not signify that the pictures fail to communicate. As Hansen remarks in her essay, Family Topographies:

I admit that people who don’t know the specific places and persons in the way I know them, in one sense will find themselves on the outside of the world I stand in and know so well. But this outside is not definitive; these topographies can also be looked at from other points of view.