June 17, 2015
7pm
Salon of former Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, Weimar

TV Snapshots. An Archive of Everyday Life Lecture by Lynn Spigel

This talk explores my collection of over 5,000 family snapshots depicting people posing in front of their TV sets in the 1950s and 1960s. I explore these snapshots as an alternative archive through which to understand television beyond its status as an entertainment/information medium. Instead, these snapshots show that people often used TV as a material backdrop for social performances of everyday life (and performances of gender, race, and class identities). I also explore these snapshots as forms of "analog nostalgia" by considering how they have reappeared today in digital forms on share sites like Pinterest, Tumbler, and other online platforms.