Exposed Memories
Family pictures in private and collective memory
Edited by
Zsófia Bán,
Associate Professor of American Studies at
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
Hedvig Turai, art historian and critic
Within the larger context of cultural memory, family
pictures have become one of the most intriguing multi-
and interdisciplinary fields of investigation in the
past decade. This field brings together artists working
in different media (e.g. documentary photography and
film, photo-based painting and installations, digital
art, collage, montage, comics, etc.) as well as academics,
critics, theorists and writers working in a wide range
of disciplines including literature, history, art history,
sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, film and media
studies, visual culture studies, gender studies, postcolonial
studies, and word and image studies. This volume intends
to offer a broad, panoramic view of the topic combining
West and East European as well as American perspectives.
"Due to some ancient, amusing misunderstanding,
family photographers push the button convinced that
they are capturing a moment from the family’s
life. Not so. Time eludes them. Still, the movingly
minute scale of a restricted life becomes visible in
these pictures. This book opens up grand and diverse
vistas of reflection on the mass production of the minute."
Péter Nádas, author of
The Book of Memories and Fire and Knowledge
"This book is an insightful interdisciplinary
exploration of the estranging effects of family pictures
at the cutting edge of the study of visual culture and
politics of representation. The book expands both the
conception of the family incorporating elective affinities
and fictional filiations and the conception of photography
incorporating ghosts, narratives and literary documents.
The essays splinter the grand narrative of history and
official memory, engaging in critical reflection on
document and fiction, politics and intimacy, narrative
and trauma.
Filled with original insights, personal parables and
theoretical finds, the volume draws on a broad range
of texts, art works and photographs including Sebald,
Boltanski, Kabakov, Eperjesi and Gjuzelova as well as
historical images from the Hungarian revolution and
anonymous pictures from immigrant archives. The book
will be of interest to researchers in a large variety
of fields from visual arts to literature, anthropology,
sociology and history as well as to the general reader."
Svetlana Boym, Harvard University,
Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, author
of The Future of Nostalgia and Another
Freedom
Contents
Introduction, Photo
as Autobiography Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer,
Incongruous Images: “Before, During, and After”
the Holocaust; Nancy K. Miller, Beguiled by Loss: The
Burden of Third-Generation Narrative; Jay Prosser, The
Baghdadi Jew and His Chinese Mistress; Photo
and Text Heinz Ickstadt, History, Narration,
and the Frozen Moment of Photography in Richard Powers’
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée; Zsófia
Bán, Memory and/or Construction: Family Images
in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz; Private
and Public Archives Rob Kroes, Virtual Communities
of Intimacy: Photography and Immigration; Géza
Boros, Buried Images: Photography in the Cult of Memory
of the 1956 Revolution; András Bán, A
Farewell to Private Photography; Suzana Milevska, EVENTfulness:
Family Archives as Events/Folds/Veils; Family
Albums Logan Sisley, Visualizing Male Homosexuality
in the Family Album; Ágnes Berecz, Please Recycle!
On Ágnes Eperjesi’s Family Album;
Object/Photo/Reality Éva Forgács,
From Photo to Object: Personal Documents as History-Writing
in the Works of Christian Boltanski and Ilya Kabakov;
Hedvig Turai, Home Museum. An Installation by Katarina
Šević and Gergely László;
List of Contributors
Published
by AICA, International Association of Art Critics, Hungarian
Section, distributed by CEU Press
2010
206 pages, includes black-and-white photos
ISBN 978-963-9776-70-8 cloth $40.00 / €30.00 /
£27.00
"The book's essays are prompted by acts of memory
that took place in Central and East Europe after 1989.
These acts, according to Ban and Turai's Introduction,
'are meant to interpret and reinterpret the past,
often focusing on topics and events that previously
had been considered taboo for collective memory (such
as the role of national politics in the Holocaust, Stalinism
or 1956)'. What makes this volume interesting and
valuable are its wide scope of insights, personal histories
and analysis and the broad range (from intimate to historical)
of texts, art works and photographs that are referenced.
I found much fascinating reading in Exposed Memories,
and I can recommend it to a select audience of readers
who may be interested in cutting edge research that
is emanating from Central Europe in the field of cultural
and visual anthropology. The generalist reader who is
interested in photography as memory may also find some
of the less scholarly essays to be rewarding."
- E-Journal
of the American Hungarian Educators Association
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