It focuses on two cases that illustrate their ideological deployment and their transformation in contemporary artistic practices: 19th and early 20th century class images from several educational establishments intended for the “civilization” of indigenous children in North America, and images taken of Jewish children in hiding in a private school in Izieu, France during the Holocaust. We will look at the afterlives of these images in the work of memorial artists Carrie Mae Weems, Lorie Novak and Steven Deo, who reframe and comment on these archival photos, revealing both their integrative force and the possibilities of subversion toward which they gesture.

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University and Vice President of the Modern Language Association of America. She has worked extensively on second-generation memory of the Holocaust and on family narratives in literature and photography. Recent books are The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust; Ghosts of Home (co-authored with Leo Spitzer); and Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (co-edited with Nancy K. Miller). With Leo Spitzer, she is currently working on a book about the afterlife of school pictures.

Leo Spitzer is Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College and Visiting Professor, Oral History Research Center, Columbia University His fellowships include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a National Humanities Center award. He writes on photography, testimony, and Jewish refugee memory and its transmission. His most recent book, co-authored with Marianne Hirsch, is Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. Other books include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism; and Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa. He is currently working on a book of stories about German-Jewish refugees in New York in the decade of the 1950s.

A reception will follow this event.

Enquiries: 02 6125 4357 or Leena Messina by email.

This lecture is co-hosted by the International Auto/biography Association Conference, the Research School of Humanities, and the Arts and the ANU Centre for European Studies.