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Family frames : photography, narrative, and postmemory / Marianne Hirsch.

By:

Hirsch, Marianne

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: [United States] : M. Hirsch ; [Charleston, SC] : CreateSpace [printer], c2012.Description: xiv, 304 p. : ill. ; 24 cmISBN:

9781470007485 (pbk. : 2012)
1470007487 (pbk. : 2012)

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

779.2 HIR

Contents:

Introduction: Family Frames -- 1. Mourning and Postmemory -- 2. Reframing the Human Family Romance -- 3. Masking the Subject -- 4. Unconscious Optics -- 5. Maternal Exposures -- 6. Resisting Images -- 7. Pictures of a Displaced Girlhood -- 8. Past Lives.

Review: Hirsch provocatively 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 powerful means for shaping personal and cultural memory. Hirsch highlights a striking example: a wide variety of family pictures surviving the Holocaust and the wrenching displacements of late twentieth-century history. Whether personal treasures, artistic constructions, or museum installations, these images link private memory to collective history.--BOOK JACKET.

Holdings ( 1 )
Title notes ( 4 )

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Standard Loan	LSAD Library Main Collection	779.2 HIR (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		39002100466227

Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-288) and index.

Hirsch provocatively 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 powerful means for shaping personal and cultural memory. Hirsch highlights a striking example: a wide variety of family pictures surviving the Holocaust and the wrenching displacements of late twentieth-century history. Whether personal treasures, artistic constructions, or museum installations, these images link private memory to collective history.--BOOK JACKET.