TV Homes: Scenes from the Family Photo Album
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Abstract
Drawing on my collection of over 5,000 snapshots featuring TV sets, this essay explores how people (mostly in the US) visualized their TV homes in the 1950s–1970s. It explores the use of TV as a posing place for the presentation of self and family. Rather than simply watch TV, people performed in front of the set, and turned the TV set as setting. The text considers a variety of spatial settings from empty spaces to theatrical spaces to uncanny spaces in TV homes. It suggests that vernacular photography provides new clues into the way people lived with TV and made their homes into TV ‘home theaters.’
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and TV’s ethereal transmissions. But
in all cases, the photos return to us as memory spaces of a time once lived. Now, at a moment when television
has morphed into digital and mobile platforms, these snapshots speak to the ‘that has been’ of an older mode of TV and everyday life when television was still a thing in the living room.
I will end by sharing my own TV photo that was the inspiration for in this essay and the larger archive I’ve obsessively amassed. The picture tells an ordinary story, but one that seems to have been repeated time and time again. It is now a memory space, a text full of the affective sensibilities that childhood photos have for their poser. But as just one of many, it also indicates a history shared by myriad people in their first TV homes. m
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Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
ALLEN, D. (1951). Cyclops...the Nature of a Net Household
Pet. Interiors, 110(12), 62–63.
BARTHES, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on
Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill & Wang.
BAZIN, A. (1967). What Is Cinema? (H. Gray, Trans.).
University of California Press.
BENJAMIN, W. (1938/2006). Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (H. Eiland, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
City of Single Women. (1959). Ebony, (February), 19–24.
CVETKOVICH, A. (2003). An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384434
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