School Photos in Liquid Time

"Inspired by pictures of Jewish schoolchildren taken in ghettos and internment camps during World War II, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer's School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference offers the first extended critical analysis of school photography. Comparing their own childhood snapshots from 1950s Romania and Bolivia with those produced in other historical spaces of persecution, from Native American boarding schools to missionary classrooms in Sierra Leone, they ask what the ubiquitous but understudied genre can tell us about power and domination. They interweave their "connective" history with examinations of contemporary photographic artwork to demonstrate how school photographs elucidate the contingency -- as much as the final product -- of assimilation and exclusion. Ambitious yet accessible, School Photographs in Liquid Time presents school photography as a new access point into institutions of power, one that reveals their capacity be disrupted by past and present actors"--