Archive of the Ordinary: Jason Lazarus, Too Hard to Keep

This article considers snapshot photography and affect through a reading of artist Jason Lazarus’s Too Hard to Keep. Lazarus’s project is an archive and shifting installation of anonymous photographs that donors can no longer bear to keep. It highlights the dual nature of the photographic snapshot – simultaneously banal and emotionally charged, tedious and intensely affecting, private and public, a site of cultural normativity as well as resistance. The article proposes that because viewers of Lazarus’s installations cannot know what specific feelings any of the images previously evoked, they are encouraged to contemplate shared practices of photography and the diffuse affective charge of ordinary photographs