Family Frames by Marianne Hirsch

Family Frames by Marianne Hirsch

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.

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her most recent books are Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, written with Leo Spitzer, and The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust.

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent books are But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives and the family memoir, What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780674292666
ISBN 10	0674292669
Titel	Family Frames
Autor	Marianne Hirsch
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Harvard University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	1997-11-15
Seitenanzahl	316
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar