Curating the Invisible, the Mundane, the Intimate: On VHS Home Movie Collections

The advent of television and the introduction of VHS in the late 1970s marked a significant cultural and historical shift in the media industry from institutional settings to the private sphere. Like earlier home movies shot on film in the 1960s and 1970s, VHS home videos from the 1980s onward created a new means of documenting everyday moments and social events from the following decades. Seen in today’s light, these amateur audiovisual archives, which are prone to various problems of preservation, shed light onto interesting cultural and historical aspects of our lives. Thus, they should be deeply appreciated as (auto)ethnographic vital cultural records, as they offer a novel insight into everyday life’s personal and collective experiences.