Description
Book Synopsis As a visual medium, the photograph has many culturally resonant properties that it shares with no other medium. These essays develop innovative cultural strategies for reading, re-reading and re-using photographs, as well as for (re)creating photographs and other artworks and evoke varied sites of memory in contemporary landscapes: from sites of war and other violence through the lost places of indigenous peoples to the once-familiar everyday places of home, family, neighborhood and community. Paying close attention to the settings in which such photographs are made and used--family collections, public archives, museums, newspapers, art galleries--the contributors consider how meanings in photographs may be shifted, challenged and renewed over time and for different purposes--from historical inquiry to quests for personal, familial, ethnic and national identity.
Trade Review “…[this volume makes a] strong contribution… to rethinking the limitations and failures of photographic representation and to challenging our own interpretive assumptions driven by desires to see and read photographs in certain ways. Rather, as the volume makes clear in unique and varied sites of research, photographic meaning and memory, unstable and in constant flux, are marked as much by forgetfulness and absence as remembrance and presence.” · H-Net
“…the discursive style of each of the chapters highlights the value of attention to oral histories…There are many chapters worth investigating in this volume, delivering as it does a specific methodological clout for the study of memory and its mutations over time which result in national deliriums, amnesia and all types of cultural disorders.” · Cultural Studies Review
“The successful combination of varied insights, from work on cultural memory and visual culture to analysis of photographic acts, makes this a unique collection of essays, an exemplary model of interdisciplinary scholarship, and a valuable asset to Berghahn Books’ ‘Remapping Cultural History’ series.” · Canadian Journal of Communication
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Locating Memory: Photographic Acts - An Introduction
Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister
PART I: IDENTITIES
Chapter 2. Re-placing History: Critiquing the Colonial Gaze through Photographic Works by Jeffrey Thomas and Greg Staats
Andrea Walsh
Chapter 3. Photography, ‘Englishness’ and Collective Memory: The National Photographic Record Association, 1897-1910
Elizabeth Edwards
Chapter 4. A Story of Escape: Family Photographs from Japanese Canadian Internment Camps
Kirsten Emiko McAllister
PART II: DIS/LOCATIONS
Chapter 5. The Return of the Aura: Contemporary Writers Look Back at the First World War Photograph
Marlene A. Briggs
Chapter 6. ‘There Was Never a Camp Here’: Searching for Vapniarka
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
Chapter 7. The Space Between: Photography and the Time of Forgetting in the Work of Willie Doherty
Andrew Quick
Chapter 8. Displaced Events: Photographic Memory and Performance Art
Nick Kaye
PART III: REFRAMINGS
Chapter 9. Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory
Patrick Hagopian
Chapter 10. Speaking the Album: An Application of the Oral-photographic Framework
Martha Langford
Chapter 11. Talking Through: This Space Around Four Pictures by Jeff Wall
Jerry Zaslove and Glen Lowry
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
