School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference

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Notes

1 As they explain, Hirsch and Spitzer choose the terms “instrumental” or “everyday” to describe the category of images they study, rather than “vernacular,” due to the latter term’s etymological origins within the system of transatlantic slavery (188).

2 Berlant distinguishes between events and environments to spatialize the slow time of everyday life in a way that seems particularly useful to Hirsch and Spitzer’s focus on the “liquid time” of school photographs. She writes, “An event is a genre calibrated according to [its] intensities and kinds of impact. Environment denotes a dialectical scene where the interaction reified as structure and agency is manifest in predictable repetitions; an environment is made via spatial practices and can absorb how time ordinarily passes, how forgettable most events are, and, overall, how people’s ordinary perseverations fluctuate in patterns of undramatic attachment and identification” (2007, 759–760).