Description
Book SynopsisExhibiting a collection of photographic travelogues, memoirs, thematic collections, and family sagas compiled between 1860 and 1960 and held by the McCord Museum of Canadian History, this second edition includes a revised and expanded preface along with new photographs of the Notman albums.
Trade Review"Langford's book joins those few exceptional works, by scholars and writers from Roland Bathes to Pierre Bourdieu to Susan Sontag, which move these meaningful documents into the forefront of communication and cultural studies. Her thesis that these albums contain fundamentally oral mnemonic and symbolic structures is both innovative and insightful." Pauline Greenhill, co-editor of Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada
"Rich and informative, theoretically fluent and emotionally involving ... Langford's original achievement in Suspended Conversations is to show how even photographs whose stories have been almost forgotten can act as prompts or notations for a performance that needs to be enacted to be kept alive, not in an original state that never existed, but in a constant process of translation, according to clues found not between the lines of texts but between the photographs on the pages of albums." History of Photography
