When the Avignone brood goes out, people rubberneck at the sight of the older white couple with five Korean and Indian children. For a while, it bothered Matthew Avignone that he did not have a “normal” family — but who among us does? In his case, his parents adopted five children — four with special needs – creating a family by choice, not chance.
“People wonder why are we together,” Mr. Avignone said. “People would come up to us at Walmart and ask my mom, ‘Are these your children?’ What I want to show is that we are not too far away from you, even though we look different. And though we have special needs, that does not define our family. What defines us is the fact that we are a family, that we love each other and that we’ll be there for each other.”
Those questions are at the heart of “Stranger Than Family,” an edition of 10 handmade books that is Mr. Avignone’s take on his Illinois family. The volume includes formal portraits of his parents and siblings, as well as details and moments from their everyday lives. If the scenes are mundane at times, that was part of his intent, to show the bonds of rituals that have brought them together.
Matthew, 27, was the first child adopted from South Korea by his parents after they learned they could not have biological children. When the Korean government cracked down on foreign adoptions of healthy children, his parents adopted three special needs children: Alicia, who had cerebral palsy; Jami, who has spina bifida; and Eric, who is visually impaired. The Korean adoptees were joined by Nicholas, an autistic child who was born in India.
The project began in 2010 while Mathew was studying photography at Columbia College in Chicago, when he presented formal portraits of his family that he had taken with a Hasselblad. His classmates had the same reaction that strangers on the street had when they saw his family: Who are these people?
That led him to tackle an essential question: How did the Avignone family come to be?
Matthew went through his parents’ papers, where he discovered the documents given by the adoption agency, especially the social history, which lays out what information was known about the child.
“Supposedly I was given up by my birth mother because her husband had passed away and she already had five children,” he said. “She met my birth father, who was a photographer as well. A short time after she became pregnant, he left. In Korea it is very unacceptable to have a child as a single mother. She gave me up for adoption so I could have a better life.”
He grew up in Peotone, Ill., a small town where he said pretty much everyone knew everyone else.
“My family was one of two families in the entire town that where nonwhite,” he said. “It was tough, dealing with being different, not having parents who look like you. But at the same time, it was the only thing I knew growing up.”
The images he produced changed in style and subject as he pursued the project. After straight-ahead portraits, he began to capture scenes of daily life, as well as still lifes of objects: Eric’s cane and audio player, and a house Nick made from return address labels. Mr. Avignone also took a looser approach to his medium-format work, using an on-camera strobe and shooting at eye level. He also included documents and archival images, like one of him with his Korean foster mother.
The notion of family took a twist during the course of the project when he learned that his sister Jami became pregnant at 17 by a boy she was seeing. The child, Mallorie, was born in 2011.
“This is the first blood birth in this family where none of us are related by blood,” he said. “Being adopted is a complicated feeling. Once Mallory was born, Jami had this person that no matter what would be with her forever. She is of her blood. For us, it was magical that this life came into our family. Jami still lives in our parents’ house and Mallorie is growing up in that house. The whole family is raising her.”
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