The sense of a generally shared repertoire of images, and the dissolution of individuality in family photography, led Novak to begin collecting family photographs among friends and family, students and colleagues. " I wanted to see if other women's images were like mine," she says of the first "Collected Visions," a slide installation of snapshots examining the representation of girls and women's development from childhood through adolescence (Hirsch 1998, 20). Some of the images are overlaid with pages from classic feminist
texts (A Room of One's Own, Writing a Woman's Life) held by Novak's hand, texts that signal the alternate plots that Novak envisions for her traditionally represented female subjects.

The ability to submit photographs and become part of the work, and the invitation to write essays about the photographs, are the most innovative aspects of the site, which thus becomes a collective autobiographical project. While some people write photoessays about their own images, it turns out that a majority of the essays submitted are about the photographs of others that most people actually write about as though they were of themselves. As Novak writes on the site itself, "maybe writing about the resonant images of others frees authors from the personal baggage surrounding their own photographs and allows them to be more revealing." But are photographs really as anonymous and interchangeable as all that? What happens to the familial look when one's own photos are surrounded by 2,500 others? How does this new context affect our relationship to our own images? There is a risk that, unmoored from their specific familial context, family pictures become too generic and thus devoid of the aura that lends them meaning. At the same time, affirming the power of the familial look comes dangerously close to affirming too uncritically and unselfconsciously the value of family itself, and most specifically of biological family. Novak's site strikes a successful if ever unstable balance between these extremes: it both affirms and subverts the aura of the individual family and the snapshot as its technology of representation.

For me as a visitor, Novak's site always introduces a tension between an autobiographical impulse and a more general interest in photographic representation. I must confess that searching though the archive by general categories to see multiple representations of birthday parties, superhero outfits, or girls cooking is ultimately boring. I am always much more interested in looking at images that are accompanied by essays which offer a verbal narrative to contextualize and situate them. And I am most fascinated by looking at pictures of people I know, especially at the pictures I myself or other members of my family submitted to the archive and that thus engage me in a familial look. There are 28 of them and I could look at them endlessly: I find new things each time I click to enlarge them, or place two or three on the screen together. When I see my pictures in the midst of others, they jump out and grab my attention completely. Although I like the idea of their placement next to so many others like them, this does significantly diminish the aura they have held for me. I have to work hard to separate them from the others. And still their power is always there, especially as they first come on the screen. In this new context, I see them as though for the first time. Each picture evokes layers of memory from when it was first taken, to when I first looked at it carefully, to the time I began writing about it in relation to other images of me or my family. I wonder why I chose to submit it and how, through these 28 images, my life story could be told. In these reactions I delimit personal from collective autobiography.

For Novak, the autobiographical - both personal and collective - is the political. CV shows us something about the sometimes discomforting power of personal images, and, also, about the conventions that disguise and overshadow that power. As a feminist artist and cultural critic, as a Jewish artist, she makes us think about the representations of women and families, of the intersectionalities inflecting those terms, and the ideologies that shape those representations. By remaking personal images, she manages both to affirm and to subvert the spell they have on her - and on the rest of us. And by engaging in autobiography through the conventions of representation, she both constructs and deconstructs a personal and professional narrative through which other women can begin to perceive the forces that constrain their own self-definitions as well as the vehicles through which they can begin at least to envision some ways out of these constraints.