Constable: Awkward Family Photos now part of Geneva History

Well, this is awkward.

With its historic district, plentiful artists, interesting restaurants and boutique shops, Geneva boasts a highfalutin heritage envied by other suburbs. The city's rich history remains on permanent display at the award-winning Geneva History Museum, where third-generation Genevan Terry Emma revels in acquiring artifacts, inspiring education and indulging researchers in the Archive Reading Room.

The museum's newest exhibit ain't as swanky.

"Eww, look at this one," Emma says, cringing and laughing at a large photograph of a creepy old man in clown makeup and boxing shorts holding a crying baby. That's just one of the more than 200 photographs on display at the Geneva History Museum's new "Awkward Family Photos" exhibit.

For a museum that just staged classic exhibitions about an early 20th Century baseball showdown between St. Charles and Geneva, a 1965 tornado and a visit from President Teddy Roosevelt, this new exhibit featuring photographs of dads in short shorts, moms with big hair and a plethora of embarrassed kids truly is awkward.

"I thought the same thing: Is this too crazy to be in our museum?" Emma says of the traveling "Awkward Family Photos" exhibit. "But when we saw it, we said, 'Who doesn't love this?'"

The feeling is mutual.

"We were thrilled to hear from the Geneva History Museum," says Mike Bender, who co-founded AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com with his partner, Doug Chermack, in 2009, and has seen it grow into a book, greeting cards, calendars, board game and traveling museum exhibit. "I speak to all the curators. I spoke to Terry and she just really gets this. In the museum world, there are people who say this doesn't belong in a museum. But these photos become art. They make a statement about family."

Just as "Mona Lisa," "Girl With A Pearl Earring" and "Whistler's Mother" are part of classic paintings, the subjects of "Awkward Family Photos" are willing participants.

"We're not mocking people. All the people wanted to be a part of this," says Bender, noting people want to share their awkward family photos. "Everybody in the exhibit has signed a release. We want them to be a part of it."

Many of the photographs are from the 1970s and '80s, when hairstyles and fashion sense trumped common sense.

"We've been laughing a lot," says museum educator Heidi Howlett, a former teacher who admits that many of these photographs elicit an "Oh, that's just wrong."

Not quite as serious as the couple in Grant Wood's "American Gothic," a shirtless man and pregnant woman wearing a bra celebrate her pregnancy by staring at a charcoal drawing of a lifelike fetus on her belly in a piece titled "Drawn Together."

"I'm trying to figure out what would be the diagnosis for those two," says longtime museum volunteer Colin Campbell, who use to be a psychotherapist, specializing in helping people with addictions and other problems. "This certainly does not restore my faith in the future of mankind."

The photos are sorted into categories such as "pregnancy," "holidays," "grandparents," "weddings" and "kids."

"All these frames are vintage," Bender says. "There is an intimacy to the exhibition. They should be hung like they are in someone's home."

To help bring about that feeling, Emma says the Strawflower Shop loaned tables, chairs and lamps, and the exhibit features touches of vintage wallpaper.

"We want people to feel like you're entering someone's living room," Emma says, noting that many of the photographs did, or still do, hang in homes. "These things aren't posed. They aren't trying to be clever."

Bender and Chermack were inspired to start the Awkward Family Photos website because of Bender's own family photo that shows his brother and him posing with their dad during a ski trip. "I'm the one who looks like a girl," Bender says of the two boys balancing on one ski.

"Art is anything that makes you think. There is so much more behind these photos," Bender says. "Some are just visually funny photographs. Some border on strange and even creepy, but they're familiar."

The exhibit touches people because everyone has an awkward photo in the past. Emma, who graduated form Geneva High School in 1982, admits to having photographs of her as an awkward teen.

"I have a perm story from 1982, and it is not good. But I don't have one like 'Granny's Got A Gun,'" Emma says, referring to one of the photos where the title says it all. "I just have the regular braces ones."

A dig into the archives unearthed some old black-and-white photos that could make the exhibit. The image of Emma's grandpa Tomasso Emma posing with two giant gourds is titled "Size Matters." The "Cheaper by the Dozen" title coined for a portrait of one large family came about after the original, "Geneva's Duggars," took on an unwanted meaning.

"This is for fun," Emma says. She reached out to Bender and Chermack after seeing their traveling museum exhibition on an NBC news segment starring Brian Williams, who no doubt now has a greater appreciation for things that are awkward.

"My museum brain kicked in and I thought, 'That looks really cool, but we're just a little history museum,'" Emma remembers thinking. Now they are the host of "Awkward Family Photos" through Aug. 15, when the exhibit heads Downstate to see how it will play in Peoria.

"I can't say we're curing cancer," Emma says of the photo exhibit. "But it's summertime. It's family appropriate. Sitting at my desk, I hear people come in and laugh. I'm going to feel good about that."

At a time when not-for-profits are scrambling for income, "This is the first year we won't be taking anything out of our endowment," predicts Emma, who adds that "90 percent of our visitors aren't members and don't live in Geneva." She's hoping plenty of visitors will pay $2 to see the "Awkward Family Photos" exhibit.

When that exhibit closes, the Geneva History Museum will offer a nice chaser.

"After this," Emma says, "we're doing beer."

This fall, the museum will host a Northern Illinois University museum exhibit titled "Brewing Identity: The Art of Craft Beer," featuring label artwork from a host of breweries, including Solemn Oath Brewery of Naperville and Two Brothers Brewing Company of Warrenville.

If you think this will mark the first time alcohol has played a major role in a Geneva History Museum exhibit, you really need to think about what led to some of those Awkward Family Photos.