Description
Book SynopsisLynn Spigel explores historical snapshots of people posing in front of their television sets in the 1950s through the early 1970s, showing how TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people visualized their lives in an increasingly mediated culture.
Trade Review“In this brilliant book Lynn Spigel examines TV snapshots as an activity, hobby art, expressive medium, and a thing people did with television, convincingly arguing for the importance of thinking about how photography and television work together. She reorients television studies away from programs and questions of spectatorship toward an exploration of the home as a ‘theater of everyday life,’ offering a diverse picture of how people use television, what the medium means, and where and how people live. I love this book and can’t wait to teach it.” -- Pamela Robertson Wojcik, author of * The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 *
"Spigel uses midcentury photographs of people posing next to television sets to construct a fascinating study of Americana. . . . A vital addition to media studies and popular culture collections." -- Claire Sewell * Library Journal *
"Spigel indicates that she worked on the book during the years when the center of gravity of television shifted from broadcast to digital streaming. Her archive of snapshots documents a phase of the medium's development shrinking into the rearview mirror. But they are also artifacts embodying something now much more familiar. The compact camera and the TV set correspond to two phases in the circulation of imagery: production and consumption respectively. In these snapshots, the image cycle is limited: flow, not a flood. The screen remains part of domestic space—and not yet, as it's becoming now, a home of sorts in its own right." -- Scott McLemee * Inside Higher Ed *
"Spigel has yet again shown herself to be a signal historian of the family, helping us make sense of the ways we actually were, in the flickering light of the pressure to be otherwise." -- Hannah Zeavin * New York Review of Books *
“Spigel dives deep into histories of race, sexuality, family and domesticity, architecture, and more, as they are called up by these snapshots. The result is a rich, wide-ranging historical account of cultural, social, and familial practices surrounding both television and photography that extrapolate what are often considered to be the dominant uses of these two media.” -- Bruno Guaraná * Film Quarterly *
"Displaying a sophisticated mastery of media studies, photographic history, and contemporary art theory, Spigel shifts seamlessly through a wide span of intellectual underpinnings. . . . At times whimsical and frequently revealing gender and class relationships, this work is engaging and thoughtful. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- D. McClure * Choice *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Companion Technologies 1
1. TV Portraits: Picturing Families and Household Things 25
2. TV Performers: A Theater of Everyday Life 72
3. TV Dress-Up: Fashion Poses and Everyday Glamour 121
4. TV Pinups: Sex and the Single TV 175
5. TV Memories: Snapshots in Digital Times 222
Conclusion: Hard Stop 255
Notes 263
Bibliography 289
Index 307
