School Pictures and Their Afterlives
With Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

The Annual Zantop Lecture followed by the dedication of the Zantop Garden

Tuesday May 5, 2009. 4.00pm Steel 006

Reception in Fairchild Atrium, from 6pm

Free and open to the Public.

Photo: Courtesy Marcelo Brodsky

Taken by commercial photographers with few artistic aspirations and little desire to deviate from formulaic representations, class photographs have received little critical attention. The institutional gazes that shape them also seem to minimize their affective charge. And yet, they have become ubiquitous media of memory and memorialization -- in art and literature, in journalism, on websites, in museums and at reunions. This paper looks at how contemporary artists have been able to mobilize the emotional life of class photos and to expose their evocative memorial and political power. Focusing particularly on Christian Boltanski and Marcelo Brodsky, two artists working in radically different geographical, historical, and political contexts, and in divergent aesthetic registers, we find that their use of school photos nevertheless enables them to stage surprisingly similar affective encounters with their art work.

Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Co-Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the Columbia University. Her  publications include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), The Familial Gaze (1999), a special issue of Signs on "Gender and Cultural  Memory" (2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004). She is in the process of completing a book entitled The Generation of Postmemory: Gender, Visuality and the Holocaust.

Leo Spitzer is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College and Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University. His  publications include Hotel Bolivia: The  Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang 1998), Lives in  Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge 1990, Hill & Wang 1999) and the co-edited Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (UPNE 1999).  He has also written numerous articles on Holocaust and Jewish refugee memory and its generational transmission. He is currently editing a concentration camp memoir, A Doctor in the Lager, by Arthur Kesselr.

Their co-authored book Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory will be published in fall 2009 at the University of California Press.

Cosponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth