The internet furnishes our lives with an unavoidable wallpaper of consumer culture—the homogenous, mass-produced, visual backdrop to which popular culture and contemporary marketing conform. These are images we do not usually actively notice, instead we read and consume them unthinkingly within the fabric of our everyday lives. Images of family are part of the wallpaper of ubiquitous visual culture, ‘stock’ representations of family which are deployed as illustrations in all manner of discursive locations. Google does not shape our attention but is shaped by what we want to find, and as such it reveals the taste of the public which engages with it. Google results could be considered a mirror for the tastes, values, sentiments, and curiosities of the mass public—or at the very least, what continues to be sold to the mass public in reflection of their assumed tastes, values, sentiments and curiosities.

Consisting of 42 individual Google image searches restricted to the location of Australia and the image type of ‘photograph’, this Index compiles the familial wallpaper of our everyday lives. The webpage heading, image, image to text description (generated by open AI huggingface) and the web address where the image appeared. This imperfect archive reflects the sameness of commercial representations of family, the languages - both visual and linguistic - which accompany certain family forms, and the nuance and complexity of family which these depictions fail to illustrate.