Search results for ""Author Martha Langford""

In Suspended Conversations Martha Langford shows how photographic albums tell intimate and revealing stories about individuals and families. Rather than isolate the individual photograph, treat albums as texts, or argue that photography has supplanted memory, she demonstrates that the photographic album must be taken as a whole and interpreted as a visual and verbal performance that extends oral consciousness.Exhibiting 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. Printed in colour throughout, the enhanced material draws out the distinct nuances and details of each album, giving them new life to tell their stories. Albums are treasured by families, collected as illustrations of the past by museums of social history, and examined by scholars for what they can reveal about attitudes and sensibilities, but when no one is left to tell the tale, the intrigue of the album becomes a puzzle, a suspended conversation. Langford argues that oral consciousness provides the missing key. Correlating photography and orality, she explains how albums were designed to work as performances and how we can unlock their mysteries.A fascinating glimpse of the preoccupations of previous centuries, Suspended Conversations brings photography into the great conversation of how we remember and how we send our stories into the future.

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The agency of photographs is a recurrent concern within the context of the city. Whether found in architectural records, social documentary, photojournalism, or artistic practice, photographic objects are embedded in urban contestation, aesthetically charged by artists, reinserted into social histories, and mobilized to imagine a future city. Photogenic Montreal takes a question initially posed by heritage debates – what does photography preserve? – and creates a rich conversation about the agency of the human actors before and behind the camera, and of the medium itself.The interplay of archives and activisms structures the book. Photographs that appear to be sealed off in newspapers, storage rooms, or archives accrue new meaning when they cross the threshold back into social spaces and circulate anew. It is through the reactivation of archival photographs that submerged traces of urban experience are discovered, and alternate histories of Montreal can be recounted. Multiple forms of activism and artistic expression complement this archival work. Beginning in the 1960s, community-minded and heritage groups responded to the tensions arising from urban reconstruction, gentrification, and the erasure of neighbourhoods; this activism also left its photographic traces.Attentive to the still-changing face of the city’s architecture, neighbourhoods, and street life, Photogenic Montreal participates in debates about who the city belongs to, who speaks on its behalf, and how to picture its past and present.

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A captivating selection of family snapshots taken from his mother's photo albums, Michael Snow’s latest artist’s book illuminates patterns and motifs in the passage of time Over the past half-century, through works such as the milestone avant-garde film Wavelength (1967), Toronto-based artist Michael Snow (born 1928) has explored the nature of perception, consciousness, language and temporality. This last theme is particularly relevant to his latest artist’s book, which is dedicated to the life of his adventurous mother, Marie-Antoinette Françoise Carmen Levesque Snow Roig, whose trove of family photographs provide a narrative throughline here. Snow consolidates his mother’s photo albums, presenting a total of 1,500 images. In a tenderly penned foreword, he explains the simple impetus for the project: “[The photographs] are so beautiful and so historic that I wish to share them with others.” While he has integrated small samples of these albums into his work before—notably figuring in his landmark catalog for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1970, Michael Snow/A Survey—this volume provides a much larger and more unified selection. As a result, the compiled images tell a more complete biographical story—one that Snow leaves intact on the surface. He brings his own layer of interpretation to the photographs by drawing out patterns within the collection and his mother’s writing. Snow creates an album that is fully his own, embracing, as art historian Martha Langford describes, a “deep understanding and surrender to form.”

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