Together, Lorie Novak's images and installations, consisting of thousands of intercalated photographs of her own family and hundreds of other people, constitute a fascinating, if unorthodox, autobiographical project. Novak portrays herself as embedded in numerous relationships - familial, generational, cultural. She interconnects her own memories with public memories of the period in which she grew up and the media images that gave her access to them - the memory of World War Two and the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War. She examines stereotyped images of femininity and masculinity, and of other social institutions. She thus situates subjectivity at the juncture between the self-portrait and the family picture, and its representation at the juncture between personal and public camera images. Autobiography is as much collective as it is personal. But most of all, she examines the technologies of representation and communication - the camera, the museum, newspapers and television, the World Wide Web. She interrogates their hegemonic dominance, and she uses them oppositionally, as instruments of contestation.

One might think, from this brief description, that her project quickly transcends the personal and autobiographical in favor of a more public exploration. But Novak herself uses the term "obsession" when describing her relationship to camera images, and a viewer of her work cannot help but notice the obsessive repetition of a few childhood photographs and the repeated preoccupations with certain historical scenes that mark this work as deeply personal. And yet her interest in including a multiplicity of media images in her own "family album" and opening her own art work to global participation by anyone who has access to the web indicate a profound rethinking of the autobiographical project. We can turn to Novak's work to think about the relational self-representation of contemporary women artists and about the quite permeable juncture between self-portraiture and family photography, between individual and cultural memory. It enables us to think about what this juncture means for a Jewish woman artist in particular.

Most of Novak's domestic spaces are populated not just by images of the artist herself, however, but by additional familial and public subjects in relation to whom she is able, visually, to tell her own story. Several iconic images - pictures of Novak's mother holding her, pictures of her with her mother and father, some images of her mother's face, a few childhood pictures of her cooking or being inducted into the Girl Scouts - recur and their repetition and recontextualization punctuate her autobiographical narrative with moments of obsessive resistance. Certain spaces also serve as repeated backdrops of the projected images, and, as the same pictures reappear in new domestic settings, outdoor projections onto trees, or public sites such as Ellis Island, they are significantly reconfigured in meaning and effect. Novak's projections are just that, projections, which present different trajectories and different interpretations of a few determinative personal narratives.

In her construction of "Fragments," Novak highlights the incongruities constructing a life story. She has broken through generational continuities, signaled in the resemblance between the daughter and the pregnant mother in the fifties photograph. She has cut up the image and the frame, in order to shed its constraints. She has proposed an alternative trajectory for herself. At the bottom, upside down, in a bathing suit, lies the woman of a new generation, refusing continuity and reflection, finding herself in fragments. Next to her lie cut-up pieces of an image of a man also wearing a bathing suit. As our eyes try to reassemble the fragments, we notice hints of irreverence: her closed eyes which refuse to gaze back at the viewer or to smile like the compliant women in the black and white photos, her hand reaching into her male companion's crotch. Conventional family pictures provide Novak with the space of disidentification. But as she so deliberately attempts to reach beyond the constraining frame of the family snapshot, Novak also affirms its power in determining her personal identity and life story.

By allowing her own childhood picture literally to be overshadowed by two public images, Novak stages an uneasy confrontation of personal memory with public history, of a familial psychodrama with the collective story of her and her parents' generation. What drama is being enacted in Novak's "Past Lives?" If it is a drama of childhood fear and the inability to trust, about the desires and disappointments of mother/child relationships, then it is also, clearly, a drama about the power of public history to crowd out personal story, about the shock of the knowledge of this history - the Holocaust and the Cold War, state power and individual powerlessness. Lorie, the little girl in the picture, is, after all, the only child who looks sad or unhappy: the other children are smiling, confidently looking toward a future they were never to have. Visually representing, in the 1980s, the memory of growing up in the United States in the 1950s, Novak includes not only family images but also those figures that might have populated her own or her mother's daydreams and nightmares: Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish mother executed by the state, and the children of Izieu, unprotected Jewish child victims of Nazi genocide. The child who lives is crowded out by the children who were killed; the mother who lives, by the mother who was executed; their lives must take their shape in relation to the murderous breaks in these other, past, lives. The representation of one girl's childhood includes, as a part of her own experience, the history into which she was born, the figures that inhabited her public life and perhaps also the life of her imagination. Personal stories and family stories are embedded in generational stories, public histories. Novak has found a photographic mode through which to express this expanded autobiographical narrative by concentrating on the images that dominate cultural and thus also personal memory. In addition, she has found a mode of presenting the picture of herself and her mother that has such powerful resonance for her that it appears in the same frame with Jewish victims of state execution.

Soon Novak's own photos, supplemented by media images and even by found snapshots, found their way into multi-media slide and sound installations still dedicated to disrupting the myth of a conflict-free family supported by the genre of the family snapshot. Works like her "Traces" (1991) and "Playback" (1992) are feminist projects that attempt to weaken the solidity and reality of traditional gender roles. These projects relativize traditionally feminine roles by placing different photographic representations of them into dialogue with one another. Photography's way of naturalizing cultural practices makes it a particularly powerful and thus insidious instrument of social conformity that Novak contests through the multiplication of images, their juxtaposition and rapid succession, as well as their supplementation by voices and music. These installations create a very different experience for viewers than the still projections do: here we can walk through the work, becoming physically and materially implicated in a series of personal photographs which in their conventionality necessarily resemble our own, and in the media images that are part of a shared cultural memory.