Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory - Tapa dura

Marianne Hirsch's new book, "Family Frames, looks at family photographs in literature and culture. Although its critical gaze ranges quite broadly--touching upon most of the writers, photographers, and critics who have been centrally concerned with family photography--the book begins and ends by considering family photos in relation to the Holocaust. This nonstandard frame for the subject puts both photography and the family into bold, new relief...This is not a cool, calm book, perfectly synthesizing nostalgia and critique. This is a brave, strong, struggling book, honest in letting us see an unflattering image of the critic. She combines what is seldom seen together: a feminist critique of the family as "haven in a heartless world" with a loving daughter's sensitivity to her Holocaust survivor parents' need to conserve a family threatened with radical loss. Marianne Hirsch's "Family Frames" offer s complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. -- Martin Sturken "Afterimage" Hirsch contemplates the relationships among images, family life, memory, lost memory and memory across generations--or "postmemory" as she calls it. For her, photographs and other images are talismans, clues and building blocks of meaning. There are no innocent snapshots for her; all recording is action fraught with political and social implication. -- Pat Aufderheide "Women's Review of Books" Marianne Hirsch's new book, "Family Frames," looks at family photographs in literature and culture. Although its critical gaze ranges quite broadly--touching upon most of the writers, photographers, and critics who have been centrally concerned with family photography--the book begins and ends by considering family photos in relation to the Holocaust. This nonstandard frame for the subject puts both photography and the family into bold, new relief...This is not a cool, calm book, perfectly synthesizing nostalgia and critique. This is a brave, strong, struggling book, honest in letting us see an unflattering image of the critic. She combines what is seldom seen together: a feminist critique of the family as "haven in a heartless world" with a loving daughter's sensitivity to her Holocaust survivor parents' need to conserve a family threatened with radical loss. -- Jane Gallop "Visual Resources" Marianne Hirsch's new book, "Family Frames", looks at family photographs in literature and culture. Although its critical gaze ranges quite broadly--touching upon most of the writers, photographers, and critics who have been centrally concerned with family photography--the book begins and ends by considering family photos in relation to the Holocaust. This nonstandard frame for the subject puts both photography and the family into bold, new relief...This is not a cool, calm book, perfectly synthesizing nostalgia and critique. This is a brave, strong, struggling book, honest in letting us see an unflattering image of the critic. She combines what is seldom seen together: a feminist critique of the family as "haven in a heartless world" with a loving daughter's sensitivity to her Holocaust survivor parents' need to conserve a family threatened with radical loss.--Jane Gallop "Visual Resources " Marianne Hirsch's "Family Frames" offer[s] complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history.--Martin Sturken "Afterimage " [Hirsch] contemplates the relationships among images, family life, memory, lost memory and memory across generations--or "postmemory" as she calls it. For her, photographs and other images are talismans, clues and building blocks of meaning. There are no innocent snapshots for her; all recording is action fraught with political and social implication.--Pat Aufderheide "Women's Review of Books "

Family photographs, snapshots and portraits, affixed to the refrigerator or displayed in gilded frames, crammed into shoeboxes or catalogued in albums, they preserve ancestral history and perpetuate memories. Indeed, photography has become the family's primary means of self-representation. In this book Marianne Hirsch uncovers both the deception and the power behind this visual record. Hirsch explores the photographic conventions for constructing family relationships and discusses artistic strategies for challenging those constructions. When we capture our family photographically, we are often responding to an idealized image. Contemporary artists and writers, Hirsch shows, have exposed the gap between lived reality and a perceived ideal to witness contradictions that shape visual representations of parents and children, siblings, lovers, or extended families. Exploring fiction, imagetexts, and photographic essays, she elucidates their subversive devices, giving particular attention to literal and metaphorical masks. While permitting false impressions and misreadings, family photos have also proved a means for shaping personal and cultural memory. Hirsch highlights an example: the wide variety of family pictures surviving the Holocaust and the displacements of late-20th-century history. Whether personal treasures, artistic constructions, or museum installations, these images link private memory to collective history.