ALLENTOWN, PA.- For three years, American photographer Lydia Panas invited families to stand before her lens. She was curious to see what would happen. Nothing was deliberate or planned. These diverse groupings of children and adults, relatives and close friends, stood graciously before her, taking positions in relationship to each other, and to the camera. The resulting images from the project are engaging and highly charged psychological family portraits that are gathered together in the artist’s debut monograph, The Mark of Abel, (Kehrer Verlag, March 2012). The portraits by Panas do not represent individuals as much as they explore questions about how we see ourselves, what we feel, and how we connect to each other. It is the details in the images that provide us with clues to understand the subtle nature of her work, and her ability to masterfully depict the delicate underpinnings of family dynamics. Her subjects ar