Abstract
In the seminal television studies text Make Room for TV, Lynn Spigel concludes her investigation of popular media in post-war America by pointing to the ‘details of everyday existence into which television inserted itself’ in magazines, films, and advertisements. These details, she argues, are clues into a ‘history of spectators in the home… that is only beginning to be written’ (Spigel, 1992: 187). In TV Snapshots, penned 30 years later in an age of readily accessible photo-sharing websites and eBay photo auctions, Spigel continues to seek out these clues in a historical examination of, as she terms it, an ‘archive of everyday life’ comprised of amateur and professional photographs of television sets taken during the 1950s and into the 1970s. In this examination of twentieth-century televisual culture, Spigel offers unique and well-illustrated insights into the representation of television as a cultural product so influential in daily life as to be worthy of a place in the family photo album.
Building on feminist methodological practices of oral history and archival research, Spigel explains that snapshots of TV imply different purposes than those suggested by the television industry; that is, rather than finding a series of images of people huddled around the TV screen as if playing out an ad for G.E.’s newest television, she uncovers lively and familial photos of people posing with their television sets alongside TV pinup photos, ‘trick shots’, and ‘screenshots’ of impactful images on TV. She carefully ‘articulates’ these images throughout the book (per Stuart Hall (1991)) by attending to variations of lived experience with a particular focus on the histories and lived practices of Black and African American families and photographers, noting that the snapshot camera could offer a means of resistance to the racist legacy of television. With TV Snapshots, Spigel expands on scholarship in feminist television studies concerned with the quotidian roles and structures of television; she places these in conversation with Roland Barthes’ foundational scholarship on images and their cultural effects (Barthes, 1981). Though she notes that analysis of everyday ephemera such as snapshots may not provide an exhaustive or perfectly contextualised historical object of study, she compellingly argues that drawing together such seemingly inconsequential material allows for an intimate and compelling view of television’s role in everyday life.
The book opens with a discussion of television’s spatial and material position in the home as captured through the snapshot camera. The vibrantly illustrated first chapter provides a range of photos of messy TV cables and cords, seasonally decorated televisions, and sentimental family groups posed before the TV that demonstrate everyday experience in the mid-century home. Here, the television sets form a reflexive relationship with the snapshot camera as one visual medium is captured and processed through another. In chapter 2, Spigel looks to the ‘increasing mediatization of home life in postwar culture’ (p.76) and the role of performance in the so-called home theatre. From ‘trick shots’ of people literally inside their TV sets to staged images of people dancing, playing instruments, or riding bicycles in front of the TV to early ‘screenshots’ of the Kennedy assassination, Spigel points to a dialectic between the liveness of television, the activities of domestic life, and the stillness of the snapshot. Together, she argues, the TV set and the snapshot camera act as ‘tools in the theatre of everyday life’ in which family and friends are performers.
The next two chapters further consider the role of gender performativity and sexuality in TV snapshots. Chapter 3 examines the ‘everyday glamour’ of women posed in front of the television before going out or after coming home. In these photographs, Spigel argues, the television acts as a ‘portal’ to the outside world; rather than bringing in live content, the screen becomes part of the ritual of leaving the home and exploring the outside world. The women standing before the television redirect and claim the gaze of the snapshot camera away from the screen in ways that sometimes challenge or even defy established gender roles. Although underrepresented in the collection, Spigel also points to images that queer these performances of femininity, looking to snapshots of people in drag for clues into the nuances of gender in the home. Chapter 4 then turns to explicitly sexualised TV pinup snapshots to articulate the role of sexuality and eroticism in a medium most-commonly associated with domestic and family life. Some of these are homemade while others featured in erotic publications like Playboy, but all offer up a recollection of the feminine performance in shots of everyday glamour. For Spigel, as for many of the feminist historians with whom she engages, these pinup shots suggest an empowerment beyond objectification.
In the final chapter, Spigel reflects on the ‘microcultures’ formed through digital archives and photo-sharing sites upon which TV snapshots are remediated. She explores how photograph databases and photo-sharing sites recreate the absences and omissions of experience in the archive and further notes her own ethical dilemmas in removing snapshots from their private, familial contexts to form a collection for public research.
To conclude, Spigel directs the field away from consideration of new mediums as replacements for older ones and suggests continued attention toward transmedia forms. Her analysis of television and the snapshot camera as ‘companion technologies’ with ‘parallel trajectories’ (p. 256) opens avenues for refreshed attention to dailiness in a time when viewing and image-capturing technologies - and our relationships to both - have markedly changed. While pointing ahead to possible futures for feminist television studies, this book is an accessible and well-illustrated read that will appeal not only to scholars of the medium but also to those with an interest in the potential of visual media to shape, alter, and commemorate the everyday.