erations of Americans born and raised after World
War II much as the legendary 1955The Family of
Manexhibition did for previous generations.
In 1954, just as color film became readily avail-
able to the amateur photographer, Novak was born
in Los Angeles. As the first child and grandchild in
her family she was frequently photographed. Her
grandparents had emigrated from Central Europe
at the time of the pogroms, and she was the begin-
ning of the second generation in America.
At the University of California in Los Angeles,
she studied photography with Robert Heinecken,
and decided to pursue a career as an artist. She
transferred to Stanford University, where she
received her B.A. in Art and Psychology in 1975.
While wandering through Europe the summer
after college, she accidentally ran a roll of film
through her camera twice. The combined images
were a breakthrough that began her exploration of
melding of time and places. Following her M.F.A.
from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Novak began exhibiting photographs of interiors
(living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens) altered by
colored lights and slide projections of shadows,
light patterns, and landscapes, layering time and
spaces through projected images.
One day, while experimenting with the slide pro-
jectors, she put in a slide from her childhood:
‘‘There I was in this room with this ghostly projec-
tion of myself as a child, and that’s what got me
started examining family photos. A lot of it is a
search for truth, what photographs mean. That
ghostly vision of myself as a child was a turning
point in my work.’’
Throughout the 1980s, Novak created color pho-
tographic prints from montaged slides projected onto
the bare walls of empty rooms. Working with snap-
shots gleaned from her family’s archives, she chose
images for their emotional evocation of familial rela-
tionships and childhood. Eventually, she added
images from the news media, creating a chronological
and cultural context for her collected family me-
mories. In 1987, while in residence at the MacDowell
Colony in New Hampshire, she began a series of
landscape works where she projected slides directly
into the landscape at night. The ground, trees, and
sky became a stage: a dark backdrop that resonated
with feelings of fear, longing, and decay.
Critical Distance, 1987– 88 was her first installa-
tion designed to be experienced in its projected
form. In early 1991, Novak installedTracesat the
University Art Museum at California State Univer-
sity, Long Beach.Traceswas followed byPlayback
in 1992, a five projector installation commissioned
by The Southeast Museum of Photography in Day-
tona Beach, Florida, for the traveling exhibition
Betrayal of Means/Means of Betrayal.
InPlayback, the 15 minute sequence included
live radio with preprogrammed stations offering
the sound equivalents of the media images.Play-
back, however, was more autobiographical than
earlier works: the material was more chronological,
and images, both public and private, were now
updated with each exhibition.
Novak began to enlarge the family snapshot
pool inCollected Visions Icommissioned by the
Houston Center of Photography in 1993 with
funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In this installation, music composed by Elizabeth
Brown and slides of women and girls examine the
representation of girlhood and the experience of
coming of age. Novak collected family snapshots
from friends, students, and colleagues, as well as
women from the Houston community, who pro-
vided her with a wide range of images from varied
generational, ethnic, and social backgrounds.
The similarity as well as the differences among
the photographs led Novak to collect more photo-
graphs of both sexes and inspired the creation of
Collected Visionson the Web, http://www.cvisions.cat.
nyu.edu. With a project grant from the Center for
Advanced Technology at New York University,
Novak teamed with sound designer Clilly Castiglia,
web designer Betsey Kershaw, and programmer
Kerry O’Neill and launched theCollected Visions
website in 1996 at a conference on family photo-
graphs at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New
Hampshire. The site, complete with a searchable
database and opportunity to write and include per-
sonal stories, is an interactive archive of family
snaps and narratives donated from people all over
the country. By 2001, the site had over 2,500 photo-
graphs submitted by over 350 people.
In 2000, Novak completed the third part of the
Collected Visionsproject, a computer-based instal-
lation that draws on the website’s extensive
archive of snapshots.Collected Visions 2000deb-
uted at the International Center of Photography’s
midtown New York gallery. The computer-driven
installation used high-resolution digital projectors
and a high-quality streaming media system created
specifically for the project by Jonathan Meyer.
Music composed by Elizabeth Brown for viola,
flute, shakuhachi, piano, and toy accordions was
mixed with people’s voices commenting on their
family photographs. As the images streamed for-
ward, words and music, cultural and personal
memories intersected, morphing time and place,
familial relationships and cultural identities into
American archetypes.NOVAK, LORIE