The familial gaze / edited by Marianne Hirsch.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hirsch, Marianne.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Photography of families--Congresses.

Photography of families.

Families--United States--Folklore--Congresses.

Families.

United States.

Genre:

Folklore.

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xxv, 353 pages, 11 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Hanover, NH : Dartmouth College, [1999]

Summary:

Since the introduction of the "Kodak" in 1888, the family photograph has provided the family with its primary means of self-knowledge and continuity. Yet family pictures tend to follow rigid conventions which support dominant familial myths and ideologies, representing the family quite uniformly as happy, stable, and unchanging. In The Familial Gaze, 22 experts -- photographers, artists, curators, writers, literary theorists, and historians -- scrutinize family photographs to reveal their power to shape our personal memories and self-conceptions. But in the images they create and discuss, these artist and writers also find an often surprising and imaginative resistance to social and aesthetic conventions. They thus expose the contradictory cultural impact of private images. This startlingly original book reveals family photography to be a truly compelling and new field of inquiry.

Contents:

Introduction: familial looking / Marianne Hirsch

Pictures from home / Larry Sultan

Collected visions / Lorie Novak

Nazism in the family album: Christian Boltanski's San Souci / Ernst van Alphen

Putting ourselves in the picture: memoirs and mourning / Nancy K. Miller

Observations of a mother / Jane Gallop, Dick Blau

Photography, narrative, and ideology in Suzanne Suzanne and Finding Christa by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch / Valerie Smith

Mein Kampf (my struggle) / Art Spiegelman

The sisters and Aunt Winnie / Albert Chong

A search for self: the photograph and Black family life / Deborah Willis

Domestic borders, cultural boundaries: Black feminists re-view the family / Elizabeth Abel

Viewing the remains: a polemic on death, spectacle, and the [Black] family / Deborah E. McDowell

The image as memorial: personal photographs in cultural memory / Marita Sturken

A meeting of two queens: an exercise in memory work / Annette Kuhn

The album and the crossing / Leo Spitzer

All in the family: familiarity and estrangement according to Marcel Proust / Mieke Bal

Seeing sentiment: photography, race, and the innocent eye / Laura Wexler

Black bodies in evidence: maternal visibility in Renâee Cox's family portraits / Andrea Liss

Photography, feminism, and the good enough mother / Joanne Leonard

Focusing on the family: family pictures and the politics of the religious right / Ann Burlein

Conclusions based on observation / Anne Higonnet

Blurring the familial: an afterword / Laura Levitt.

Notes:

"This volume originated in an exhibition entitled 'The familial gaze' and a conference on 'Family pictures/shapes of memory' held at Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art in the spring of 1996"--Pref.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0874518954

9780874518955

OCLC:

39539489