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Catherine Zuromskis. Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2013. 264 pp. ISBN 978-0262019293, $34.95.
In her art-historical study of the neglected genre of snapshot photography, Catherine Zuromskis takes on the delicate task of expanding on canonical post-modernist and feminist critiques of the photographic medium. Noting that "private affect can be employed and regulated through public life," Zuromskis adopts the customary argument that the family photograph is never free of the conventions of mass culture and the politics of representation. But she successfully refashions that argument, partly by drawing on the contemporary queer theory of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, among others. While Zuromskis acknowledges that the snapshot constructs the image of the American family, she attends to the instinct, desire, and affect that inspire us to shoot, share, collect, and prize pictures of loved ones. Through her case studies Zuromskis shows that the snapshot genre can be appropriated by communities that aspire to represent their alternative modes of social belonging. These photographs are not kept secret. Instead, they circulate through the community itself, creating what Warner calls a "counter-public" of emotionally and socially engaged viewers.
Zuromskis does not concentrate on private familial or individual uses of snapshots. Instead, she examines the multiple ways that vernacular photography is shaped and disseminated through an American culture that fetishizes the snapshot-perfect nuclear family. Drawing on Berlant's work, Zuromskis argues that this idealized form of the family plays a key role in conservative rhetoric that links the...