School Photos in Liquid Time

"[A] new book by Marianne Hirsch, the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a professor at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, examines this common but overlooked genre of vernacular photography for the first time."

"Every new publication from Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer is an event to be welcomed and read with deep attention. When we encounter their co-authored work — on memorial objects, witness testimonies, photographs, and family secrets — we are given a triple dose of insight, fine-tuned historical research, and transformative close readings of freighted images. Their latest book, School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, is no different."

"Hirsch and Spitzer’s investigation into the school photograph as a site where difficult histories play out is a timely and important contribution to how we imagine the critical and affective potential of everyday photographs."

"[P]ath-breaking...the book is commended for offering a full-length study devoted to school photos and for directing academic attention to a genre of vernacular photography that has received only a paucity of scholarly and historical investigation."

"This phenomenal book is about world knowledge and the possibilities that occur with the experience of an education. It is a much needed book that unites individual and group portraits from photographic archives from around the world. By including contemporary artists' reconstructed images of their own past and looking school portraits as a source for questioning identity, the authors invite the reader to recognize the importance of education to a wide range of people. The photographic images in this collection deconstruct and reimagine critical periods in visual culture through formulating ideas about group identity in search of an education. The book opens up old wounds focusing on difference and unites individuals on the basis of similar experiences in distant places. It forces us to be aware of other forms of educational structures that promoted separatism, religious doctrines, racism, and sexism and at the same time guides the reader through a complex visual history of hopeful ambitions. It is a visual testimony that highlights the cultural legacy of education. Engaging read and thoughtfully edited. A must read!"

"Everyone hates their school photos! But in this brilliant and surprisingly political book, Hirsch and Spitzer show how these seemingly pedestrian vernacular images can often reveal bold challenges to ritualized social conformity."

"Hirsch and Spitzer take a common and overlooked genre of vernacular photography, the school photo, and bring together images separated by time and place into a compelling conversation, with analysis that is both stimulating and accessible."

"A beautifully written and very readable work that uncovers surprising and counterintuitive resonances between different iterations of school photographs, captured amid historical trauma."

"School photographs have long been constitutive of our envisioned selves, as we are alone and as we are with others. Indeed, they are deeply generative, with a disciplinary pedagogy of their own which most children in the world now learn at an early age. They may be permissive or coercive, nurturing or stunting, celebratory or grievous, and very much more. But never have they been so expansively and brilliantly interrogated. This book gathers and consolidates school photographs as a category for comparative critique of the worlds we do and do not share, of fractured hopes once held, of dreams renewed. Required Reading."