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Imagens imóveis: Sobre fotografia e memória
For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life, examining twelve family photographs to construct a memoir from camera-caught moments, each of which pose questions of their own.
She begins with the picture of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague at the age of five in 1939. From there we follow her to the Czech enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escaped the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Malcolm delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker , and the libel trial that led her to become a character in her own drama.
Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like no other.
She begins with the picture of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague at the age of five in 1939. From there we follow her to the Czech enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escaped the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Malcolm delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker , and the libel trial that led her to become a character in her own drama.
Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like no other.
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 10, 2023
112 people are currently reading
5160 people want to read
About the author
Janet Malcolm
25 books516 followersJanet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of
In the Freud Archives
and
The Crime of Sheila McGough
, as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Anton Chekhov.
The Modern Library chose her controversial book The Journalist and the Murderer — with its infamous first line — as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.
Her most recent book is Forty-one False Starts .
The Modern Library chose her controversial book The Journalist and the Murderer — with its infamous first line — as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.
Her most recent book is Forty-one False Starts .
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November 17, 2022
As someone who once wrote “I have never found anything any artist has said about his work interesting,” Janet Malcolm, in her latest (posthumously published) book “Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory”, accordingly says little about her work but a great deal about her life. Seen through the unforgiving lens of the camera and the unreliable eye of memory, veracity is, as she herself admits, arbitrary.
That Malcolm, so incisive a portraitist in words, should turn again to the camera as a conceptual device isn’t surprising. Photography as an art form has long beguiled her. As a staff writer for The New Yorker, she wrote for many years on art and interior design. Her first book, published in 1980 was “Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography” A subsequent book “Forty One False Starts” included essays on photography and photographers. In writing about Thomas Struth, she says “photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.”
Inescapable truthfulness is, of course, a trademark of the Malcolm style. As for the camera, it may not lie but it can conceal – move the frame slightly, change the angle, adjust the focus and what you see may be either less or more than the truth. Likewise, in her memoir, Malcolm’s disclosures may not be more than the truth, but they are redacted. We are given fragments of the life seen from angles.
For a writer who had a reputation as “a formidable interviewer and a ferocious portraitist” Malcolm was very diffident when it came to writing about herself. “I would rather flunk a writing test,” she said, "than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.”
Writing of an abandoned attempt at autobiography in 2010 in The New York Review of Books she said the journalist who tries to write an autobiography "has more of an uphill fight than other practitioners of the genre". The unsparing, rational "I" of journalism must be discarded in favour of the softer, more indulgent "I" of autobiography, one who tells their story "as a mother might ... with tenderness and pity, empathising with its sorrows and allowing for its sins." Judging herself a failure at this she says, "Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection”.
There is no such failure here, either of interest or affection. Wry admissions of youthful callousness notwithstanding, there’s a softness in the “I” of this memoir. Of the photos, many of which she found in a box in her apartment, she is less forgiving, at least at first glance, judging them gray and uninteresting and comparing them to “barely flickering dreams that dissipate as we awaken”. But, on closer examination, “the drab little photographs” begin to speak to her.
They speak of people and relationships and the unfolding of a young child's formative years within the immediate circle of family and the larger crucible of tumultuous world events. Like the collages she enjoyed creating in later life, these assembled photographs are ephemeral in nature, small sketches that suggest a greater theme.
In the observations provoked by the photographs, it’s the woman rather than the writer who steps from the frame. Despite her reputation as a formidable journalist, her take no prisoners approach to interview subjects and her skewering of fakery in all its forms, the self-portrait we see here is relatable and engaging. Humour, a droll self-deprecation, warmth and a kinder acceptance of the frailties of herself and others round off the sharp edges of the public portrait.
We’re first introduced to the author as a toddler, aged two or three, sitting on a doorstep, dressed in a sunsuit and hat, hands on knees, grinning, as if at something funny someone’s said to her. To the adult Malcolm, this child is unrecognisable. A few years later we see a young girl aged nearly five looking out with her parents from the window of a train taking them from Prague to Hamburg. Again, Malcolm has no memory of being that girl. Or of knowing they were to board a ship taking them to a new life in New York. It’s only in hindsight she learns the momentous nature of the journey, that they were fleeing Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis because they were Jewish. Like a curtain unfurling, the unrecognisable slowly appears, takes on meaning and allows the interpretation of what meant little to the child at the time - her family’s national and racial identity, their assimilation into a new country and how she and her sister’s imaginative lives were inexorably shaped by those experiences.
This collection was composed of various pieces she wrote at different times, never intending them to form a memoir or autobiography, but rather seeing them as improvisations, explorations of the close interrelationship between the visual and the written. Fragmentary though this approach might suggest, it coheres as memoir, notwithstanding her statement that ”memory speaks only some of its lines”. With characteristic elegance, she rationalises the incompleteness of the final result – “most of what happens to us goes unremembered. The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.”
Incomplete they may be, but these glimpses into the life and career of a legendary writer will become as deservedly acclaimed as her other works. Like photography itself, the significance lies in what’s revealed. As Ian Frazier (a close friend) says in his introduction to the book “she wrote these pieces at a level of wisdom that took a lifetime to attain, and that almost nobody reaches at any age.”
Janet Malcolm’s book was of special interest to me, as in an extraordinary reversal of circumstances, I once interviewed her. This happened a few years ago in New York at an unmemorable restaurant on Broadway on a wintry Sunday afternoon. To say it was an occasion that immediately went into the developing solution of my memory is a huge understatement, as I’ll never forget it. Well may you ask what I, a modest uncelebrated scribbler from little old Adelaide, was doing in New York but more to the point, sitting across a table from one of the literary lions of our age.
Here's how it happened.
In the embryonic stages of the book I was trying to write, I’d somehow convinced a government arts funding body it would be a worthy act to finance me on a research trip to the US and Paris. My powers of persuasion proved greater than my powers of getting the book published as it’s turned out, but we won’t go there. Janet Malcolm’s remarkable book “Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude”, had become a cornerstone of my reading on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, the putative subjects of my putative book. Janet Malcolm, I knew, lived in New York and so it was but a small step to email her and request an interview. (One of the dubious benefits of email is it makes it all too easy to practice the nothing ventured nothing gained approach).
That she not only replied but agreed to give up her time to an unknown, unpublished and unproven Australian writer seemed to me evidence that miracles happen. More to the point, it was evidence of her remarkable generosity, openness and graciousness.
Lacking photographs, here are the assembled fragments of memory:
I arrived late in a sweating, red faced panic after the cab somehow got lost between my hotel and the restaurant. She waited.
In a fluster of fumbling for my notebook, I dropped everything out of my handbag onto the floor. She pretended it didn’t happen.
I said it was hard to hear above the music. She asked a waitress to turn it off.
I said it was hard to write about legends like Stein and Toklas. She asked ,with a cheeky smile, if I was going to mention Toklas’s moustache.
I apologised for sniffing (I had a cold). She said she had one too.
On parting, I started babbling about how grateful, how appreciative, how lovely … etc. etc. She said when I had a draft, send it and she’d show it to her editor. (Cue to slashing wrists because I still don’t have a decent draft and now I don’t have her.) One of the pathetic secrets of my heart.
PS: I still have the emails we exchanged – faded photos of a different kind.
Thank you to Farrar Straus & Giroux for giving me an advance review copy of the book.
That Malcolm, so incisive a portraitist in words, should turn again to the camera as a conceptual device isn’t surprising. Photography as an art form has long beguiled her. As a staff writer for The New Yorker, she wrote for many years on art and interior design. Her first book, published in 1980 was “Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography” A subsequent book “Forty One False Starts” included essays on photography and photographers. In writing about Thomas Struth, she says “photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.”
Inescapable truthfulness is, of course, a trademark of the Malcolm style. As for the camera, it may not lie but it can conceal – move the frame slightly, change the angle, adjust the focus and what you see may be either less or more than the truth. Likewise, in her memoir, Malcolm’s disclosures may not be more than the truth, but they are redacted. We are given fragments of the life seen from angles.
For a writer who had a reputation as “a formidable interviewer and a ferocious portraitist” Malcolm was very diffident when it came to writing about herself. “I would rather flunk a writing test,” she said, "than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.”
Writing of an abandoned attempt at autobiography in 2010 in The New York Review of Books she said the journalist who tries to write an autobiography "has more of an uphill fight than other practitioners of the genre". The unsparing, rational "I" of journalism must be discarded in favour of the softer, more indulgent "I" of autobiography, one who tells their story "as a mother might ... with tenderness and pity, empathising with its sorrows and allowing for its sins." Judging herself a failure at this she says, "Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection”.
There is no such failure here, either of interest or affection. Wry admissions of youthful callousness notwithstanding, there’s a softness in the “I” of this memoir. Of the photos, many of which she found in a box in her apartment, she is less forgiving, at least at first glance, judging them gray and uninteresting and comparing them to “barely flickering dreams that dissipate as we awaken”. But, on closer examination, “the drab little photographs” begin to speak to her.
They speak of people and relationships and the unfolding of a young child's formative years within the immediate circle of family and the larger crucible of tumultuous world events. Like the collages she enjoyed creating in later life, these assembled photographs are ephemeral in nature, small sketches that suggest a greater theme.
In the observations provoked by the photographs, it’s the woman rather than the writer who steps from the frame. Despite her reputation as a formidable journalist, her take no prisoners approach to interview subjects and her skewering of fakery in all its forms, the self-portrait we see here is relatable and engaging. Humour, a droll self-deprecation, warmth and a kinder acceptance of the frailties of herself and others round off the sharp edges of the public portrait.
We’re first introduced to the author as a toddler, aged two or three, sitting on a doorstep, dressed in a sunsuit and hat, hands on knees, grinning, as if at something funny someone’s said to her. To the adult Malcolm, this child is unrecognisable. A few years later we see a young girl aged nearly five looking out with her parents from the window of a train taking them from Prague to Hamburg. Again, Malcolm has no memory of being that girl. Or of knowing they were to board a ship taking them to a new life in New York. It’s only in hindsight she learns the momentous nature of the journey, that they were fleeing Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis because they were Jewish. Like a curtain unfurling, the unrecognisable slowly appears, takes on meaning and allows the interpretation of what meant little to the child at the time - her family’s national and racial identity, their assimilation into a new country and how she and her sister’s imaginative lives were inexorably shaped by those experiences.
This collection was composed of various pieces she wrote at different times, never intending them to form a memoir or autobiography, but rather seeing them as improvisations, explorations of the close interrelationship between the visual and the written. Fragmentary though this approach might suggest, it coheres as memoir, notwithstanding her statement that ”memory speaks only some of its lines”. With characteristic elegance, she rationalises the incompleteness of the final result – “most of what happens to us goes unremembered. The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.”
Incomplete they may be, but these glimpses into the life and career of a legendary writer will become as deservedly acclaimed as her other works. Like photography itself, the significance lies in what’s revealed. As Ian Frazier (a close friend) says in his introduction to the book “she wrote these pieces at a level of wisdom that took a lifetime to attain, and that almost nobody reaches at any age.”
Janet Malcolm’s book was of special interest to me, as in an extraordinary reversal of circumstances, I once interviewed her. This happened a few years ago in New York at an unmemorable restaurant on Broadway on a wintry Sunday afternoon. To say it was an occasion that immediately went into the developing solution of my memory is a huge understatement, as I’ll never forget it. Well may you ask what I, a modest uncelebrated scribbler from little old Adelaide, was doing in New York but more to the point, sitting across a table from one of the literary lions of our age.
Here's how it happened.
In the embryonic stages of the book I was trying to write, I’d somehow convinced a government arts funding body it would be a worthy act to finance me on a research trip to the US and Paris. My powers of persuasion proved greater than my powers of getting the book published as it’s turned out, but we won’t go there. Janet Malcolm’s remarkable book “Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude”, had become a cornerstone of my reading on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, the putative subjects of my putative book. Janet Malcolm, I knew, lived in New York and so it was but a small step to email her and request an interview. (One of the dubious benefits of email is it makes it all too easy to practice the nothing ventured nothing gained approach).
That she not only replied but agreed to give up her time to an unknown, unpublished and unproven Australian writer seemed to me evidence that miracles happen. More to the point, it was evidence of her remarkable generosity, openness and graciousness.
Lacking photographs, here are the assembled fragments of memory:
I arrived late in a sweating, red faced panic after the cab somehow got lost between my hotel and the restaurant. She waited.
In a fluster of fumbling for my notebook, I dropped everything out of my handbag onto the floor. She pretended it didn’t happen.
I said it was hard to hear above the music. She asked a waitress to turn it off.
I said it was hard to write about legends like Stein and Toklas. She asked ,with a cheeky smile, if I was going to mention Toklas’s moustache.
I apologised for sniffing (I had a cold). She said she had one too.
On parting, I started babbling about how grateful, how appreciative, how lovely … etc. etc. She said when I had a draft, send it and she’d show it to her editor. (Cue to slashing wrists because I still don’t have a decent draft and now I don’t have her.) One of the pathetic secrets of my heart.
PS: I still have the emails we exchanged – faded photos of a different kind.
Thank you to Farrar Straus & Giroux for giving me an advance review copy of the book.
April 9, 2023
A quick memoir with short chapters that use an old photograph as a starting point. Mostly childhood memories about family and friends amongst the Czech immigrant communities in New York City. A lovely read with nice insights into family and memory.
December 4, 2023
Photos and memory, with their blurred lines and dream like phantoms, are not necessarily accurate, but more like markers that might lead one to recall a moment of your life, or not really.
Janet Malcolm explores her own experience of gazing at photos and conjuring stories that only she can tell us.
Janet Malcolm explores her own experience of gazing at photos and conjuring stories that only she can tell us.
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November 8, 2022A last despatch from the great...well, biographer is hardly the word. Biographer of biographies, maybe? The woman who'd map the thickets that had grown up around a reputation over the years, who made a career out of giving her subjects enough rope. Indeed, the final chapters here go full 'needless to say, I had the last laugh' regarding one person she wrote about who had the temerity to sue, and the fortuitous mistrial which gave Malcolm a chance to drop her New Yorker (as in the magazine) persona and show him the error of his ways. She also admits to an absolutely brilliant prank on two generations of photography students. But these chapters are the exception; for the most part this is a book in which someone nearing the end of a long life sets down fragmentary memories of a lost childhood, simply so that some echo of those moments would be preserved once she herself was no longer around to remember them. And it was an eventful life; I had no idea that her family were Czech Jews who'd narrowly escaped the Holocaust, and it seems to be only while writing this that Malcolm herself realised, for instance, that having thought of her parents as permanent exiles, in fact they spent most of their life in America. Where they became more respectable figures than the bohemian (in both senses) young couple who'd partied with Karel Capek. Although, of course, many couples change like that once they have kids, even without one of history's great monsters chasing them from Mitteleuropa to the USA. The framing device is a series of photographs, each sparking memories – much like Jarvis Cocker's recent memoir in objects, as it happens, though the mood here is considerably more elegiac. She is, of course, still Janet Malcolm to the end, keenly aware that this account must be as incomplete and partial as any she ever picked at, if not more so. But there's a fondness here, a desire to somehow fix happy moments from long ago, that weighs heavier: "My mind is filled with lovely plotless memories of him. The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography, which gives it its vitality if not its raison d'etre. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification – and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them. "Who asked you to tarnish my image with your miserable little hurts?" the dead person might reasonably ask." So there's just enough of that sin here to stop things getting sappy in a way Malcolm would never have allowed herself, but the dominant mood is a great sorrow at all the little joys lost to Time, all the now-insoluble mysteries we might have solved if only we'd thought to ask in time: "We are each of us an endangered species. When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will ever exist again. The lives of great artists and thinkers and statesmen are like the lives of the great extinct species, the tyrannosaurs and stegosaurs, while the lives of the obscure can be likened to extinct species of beetles. Daddy would probably not find this conceit of great interest. He moved along his own trail. He liked to pick and identify certain small, frail, white wildflowers that it never occurred to me to notice, and that he never forced on my attention."
(Netgalley ARC)
(Netgalley ARC)
March 9, 2023
I stand in awe of this lady's outstanding self-possessed writing voice and deliciously witty humour!
March 7, 2023
2.5*
Susidomėjau šia knyga dėl fotografijos temos. Tikėjausi jog šių esė formatai bus, kuomet konkreti fotografija paimama kaip atspirties taškas užmanytai autoriaus teksto plėtotei arba/ir kuomet autoriai/-ės tiesiog analizuoja vieną konkrečią ar daugiau fotografijų (nebūtinai menines). O čia gi Janet Malcolm, The New Yorkeryje dirbusios, kaip fotografijos kritikės, knyga. O viršelis ir paantraštė 'On Photography and Memory' rėkte rėkia, jog fotografija čia bus reikšmingas veiksnys. Iš pradžių panašėjo į tai, bet labia greit mano džiaugsmas išsivadėjo. Nors, pačioje pabaigoje pora esė buvo vėl “į temą”.
Autorė pradeda nuo savo vaikystės - sužavėjusio mane šmaikštaus dviejų nuotraukų (savo ir Louis-François Bertin portreto) sugretimo. Ši pirma autorės esė buvo tobula.
Toliau sekė jos pačios šeimos bėgimo iš Čekijos nuo fašizmo ir čekijos žydų pabėgelių bendruomenės JAV (pagrinde NY) istorijos. Bet man jos pasirodė blausiai papasakotos. Kažkodėl į šį rinkinį įtraukta jai iškeltos bylos istorija “/
Galvoju, gal, knyga išėjo tokia, nes išleista jau po autorės mirties. Ji nespėjo jos užbaigti ir sutvarkyti, todėl ji man jautėsi labai jau netvarkinga, nevientisa.
Nedidukė, užtikau įdomių minčių apie fotografiją ir atmintį, tad bandykit. Gal jums patiks labiau.
‘The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photograph are what we call our memories.’
‘Taking a picture is a transformative act.’
‘Autobiography is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines. Like biography, it enlists letters and the testimony of contemporaries in its novelistic enterprice. […]’
Beje, kaip visada džiaugiuosi užtikusi man negirdėtų fotografų pavardžių. Užsisakiau bibliotekoje jų albumų ir labai tikiuosi netikėtumų (Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Nancy Rexroth, William Eggleston).
Mane užkabinusias tokio formato esė radau Dyer Geoff knygoje OtherwiseKnown as the Human Condition ; pas Maria Stepanovą In Memory of Memory ; pas Annie Ernaux pasitaiko tokių inkliūzų (tik be pačių nuotraukų); Patti Smith esė knygose taip pat.
Jeigu kas esat užmatę ką nors panašaus, prašau, rekomenduokit :)
Susidomėjau šia knyga dėl fotografijos temos. Tikėjausi jog šių esė formatai bus, kuomet konkreti fotografija paimama kaip atspirties taškas užmanytai autoriaus teksto plėtotei arba/ir kuomet autoriai/-ės tiesiog analizuoja vieną konkrečią ar daugiau fotografijų (nebūtinai menines). O čia gi Janet Malcolm, The New Yorkeryje dirbusios, kaip fotografijos kritikės, knyga. O viršelis ir paantraštė 'On Photography and Memory' rėkte rėkia, jog fotografija čia bus reikšmingas veiksnys. Iš pradžių panašėjo į tai, bet labia greit mano džiaugsmas išsivadėjo. Nors, pačioje pabaigoje pora esė buvo vėl “į temą”.
Autorė pradeda nuo savo vaikystės - sužavėjusio mane šmaikštaus dviejų nuotraukų (savo ir Louis-François Bertin portreto) sugretimo. Ši pirma autorės esė buvo tobula.
Toliau sekė jos pačios šeimos bėgimo iš Čekijos nuo fašizmo ir čekijos žydų pabėgelių bendruomenės JAV (pagrinde NY) istorijos. Bet man jos pasirodė blausiai papasakotos. Kažkodėl į šį rinkinį įtraukta jai iškeltos bylos istorija “/
Galvoju, gal, knyga išėjo tokia, nes išleista jau po autorės mirties. Ji nespėjo jos užbaigti ir sutvarkyti, todėl ji man jautėsi labai jau netvarkinga, nevientisa.
Nedidukė, užtikau įdomių minčių apie fotografiją ir atmintį, tad bandykit. Gal jums patiks labiau.
‘The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photograph are what we call our memories.’
‘Taking a picture is a transformative act.’
‘Autobiography is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines. Like biography, it enlists letters and the testimony of contemporaries in its novelistic enterprice. […]’
Beje, kaip visada džiaugiuosi užtikusi man negirdėtų fotografų pavardžių. Užsisakiau bibliotekoje jų albumų ir labai tikiuosi netikėtumų (Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Nancy Rexroth, William Eggleston).
Mane užkabinusias tokio formato esė radau Dyer Geoff knygoje OtherwiseKnown as the Human Condition ; pas Maria Stepanovą In Memory of Memory ; pas Annie Ernaux pasitaiko tokių inkliūzų (tik be pačių nuotraukų); Patti Smith esė knygose taip pat.
Jeigu kas esat užmatę ką nors panašaus, prašau, rekomenduokit :)
April 23, 2023
I’m sorry I’ve never heard of Janet Malcolm or previously read her writing but I’m pleased that I stumbled (I read/heard a recommendation) across this book. While it is autobiographical it does not require any prior knowledge or really any particular interest in the writer.
It captures a life, that like many, (including my own) comes from a very middle class, ordinary background and yet somehow she turns this into a fleshed out book via a collection of images. I like how she doesn’t remember every detail of the photo and sometimes she can’t recall the people but yet she does retain a sense of the time and place around these moments. It is also done with a humorous touch that makes you feel included in the joke but never seeks to blame or humiliate anyone. It’s just a lived life.
It captures a life, that like many, (including my own) comes from a very middle class, ordinary background and yet somehow she turns this into a fleshed out book via a collection of images. I like how she doesn’t remember every detail of the photo and sometimes she can’t recall the people but yet she does retain a sense of the time and place around these moments. It is also done with a humorous touch that makes you feel included in the joke but never seeks to blame or humiliate anyone. It’s just a lived life.
January 24, 2023
I really enjoyed this memoir STILL PICTURES: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm! I loved how it’s told through pictures of important people in her life growing up. I’ve never read any of her work before but this book was very interesting to discuss the way we look back on pictures from our past and what memories they conjure. I liked how this book combines memoir, art, photography, and essay form. I loved its conciseness and read it in one day. I’m very glad I got to read this book!
Thank you to FSG Books for my gifted review copy!
Thank you to FSG Books for my gifted review copy!
January 20, 2023
i love Janet Malcolm so much, not sure why this fell so flat. I wanted so much more on her life, her perspective in photography, everything. Instead we get lots of essays of her introducing people as “modest, kind” and honestly a weirdly dated type of writing that I can only attribute to her old age as her earlier writing doesn’t feel so…methodical? a lot of these stories are just so dull. I expected genius I think.
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April 21, 2023The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing – publisher of Still Pictures
‘Superb…[The] final, splendid, most personal work of her long career.’
New York Times
‘These [Still Pictures] essays are a radical departure from everything else Malcolm wrote over the course of her career: they concern people, places, and items that populated her younger life…She used her journalistic work to explore her own mind, especially some of its more submerged corners…She knew better than most that the only thing scarier than writing about oneself is letting someone else wrest control of the narrative.’
Eve Sneider, LitHub
‘Malcolm subverts the traditional memoir by telling her story around a series of photographs. The “reluctant autobiographer” turns out to be a skilled scrapbook artist.’
Harper’s Bazaar
‘From the moment you open it, the book does not present itself as a conventional memoir...Most autobiography assumes a proximity, an easy intimacy with the past, an unbroken flow. This one argues instead that memories must be fought for, interrogated, uncovered...In some sense Malcolm’s book is the last argument in her career-long project to question the production of official stories, to reveal and illuminate the million vanities, exaggerations, character flaws that feed into their creation: the human error.’
Katie Roiphe, Atlantic
‘Touching...What leavens Still Pictures throughout is Czech humour that, in its irreverence and intolerance for pomposity, is similar to Australian wit.’
Kurt Johnson, Age/SMH
‘Quietly brilliant, beautifully meandering…A profound and transformative intervention in the field of life writing and literature generally...This book, the mature work of a writer at the end of her life but at the height of her understanding, is essentially a paean to what goes unremembered. It’s a reading experience I won’t readily forget.’
Maria Takolander, Saturday Paper
‘Highly evocative.’
Richard Johnstone, Inside Story
‘An apt and fascinating coda to a celebrated and provocative life’s work.’
Belinda Castles, Conversation
‘Selective postcards of asperity and wisdom... Its jumbled cast...are so wonderfully and lucidly sketched—a lost world to be found in their manners, their clothes, their furniture (a covered pewter bowl is a novel in itself). Even as Malcolm insists that the past issues no visas, she slips smoothly over the border, lost papers only spurring her on.’
Rachel Cooke, Guardian
‘Lean, clear and powerful…[Malcolm] is very honest.’
RNZ Nine to Noon
‘A testament to those attributes Malcolm most admired (and relied on her journalistic subjects to lack): dignity, discretion, craft, and control. In its guardedness, its respect for privacy, its disinterest in demythologizing, its tenderness and even credulity, Still Pictures makes explicit a muted moral provocation running through Malcolm’s books: that we are all essentially false Pharisees, serial violators of the Golden Rule, constantly claiming exemptions, forbearance, and reprieves for ourselves (and those whom we love) that we would never permit to others.’
Sam Adler-Bell, New Republic
‘Malcolm has found a way to make the biographical humble, in the best sense of that word, allowing nuance, uncertainty, and association, not conviction, to drive her telling of human lives…Malcolm’s writing leaves nowhere to hide, yet her subjects—even at their worst—are held in her profoundly humanistic gaze, as still as a picture.’
Georgina Arnott, Australian Book Review
‘Superb…[The] final, splendid, most personal work of her long career.’
New York Times
‘These [Still Pictures] essays are a radical departure from everything else Malcolm wrote over the course of her career: they concern people, places, and items that populated her younger life…She used her journalistic work to explore her own mind, especially some of its more submerged corners…She knew better than most that the only thing scarier than writing about oneself is letting someone else wrest control of the narrative.’
Eve Sneider, LitHub
‘Malcolm subverts the traditional memoir by telling her story around a series of photographs. The “reluctant autobiographer” turns out to be a skilled scrapbook artist.’
Harper’s Bazaar
‘From the moment you open it, the book does not present itself as a conventional memoir...Most autobiography assumes a proximity, an easy intimacy with the past, an unbroken flow. This one argues instead that memories must be fought for, interrogated, uncovered...In some sense Malcolm’s book is the last argument in her career-long project to question the production of official stories, to reveal and illuminate the million vanities, exaggerations, character flaws that feed into their creation: the human error.’
Katie Roiphe, Atlantic
‘Touching...What leavens Still Pictures throughout is Czech humour that, in its irreverence and intolerance for pomposity, is similar to Australian wit.’
Kurt Johnson, Age/SMH
‘Quietly brilliant, beautifully meandering…A profound and transformative intervention in the field of life writing and literature generally...This book, the mature work of a writer at the end of her life but at the height of her understanding, is essentially a paean to what goes unremembered. It’s a reading experience I won’t readily forget.’
Maria Takolander, Saturday Paper
‘Highly evocative.’
Richard Johnstone, Inside Story
‘An apt and fascinating coda to a celebrated and provocative life’s work.’
Belinda Castles, Conversation
‘Selective postcards of asperity and wisdom... Its jumbled cast...are so wonderfully and lucidly sketched—a lost world to be found in their manners, their clothes, their furniture (a covered pewter bowl is a novel in itself). Even as Malcolm insists that the past issues no visas, she slips smoothly over the border, lost papers only spurring her on.’
Rachel Cooke, Guardian
‘Lean, clear and powerful…[Malcolm] is very honest.’
RNZ Nine to Noon
‘A testament to those attributes Malcolm most admired (and relied on her journalistic subjects to lack): dignity, discretion, craft, and control. In its guardedness, its respect for privacy, its disinterest in demythologizing, its tenderness and even credulity, Still Pictures makes explicit a muted moral provocation running through Malcolm’s books: that we are all essentially false Pharisees, serial violators of the Golden Rule, constantly claiming exemptions, forbearance, and reprieves for ourselves (and those whom we love) that we would never permit to others.’
Sam Adler-Bell, New Republic
‘Malcolm has found a way to make the biographical humble, in the best sense of that word, allowing nuance, uncertainty, and association, not conviction, to drive her telling of human lives…Malcolm’s writing leaves nowhere to hide, yet her subjects—even at their worst—are held in her profoundly humanistic gaze, as still as a picture.’
Georgina Arnott, Australian Book Review
March 10, 2024
elegantíssimo.
January 11, 2024
Miss you, Janet
December 24, 2024
em dezembro de 2023, prometi a mim mesmo que ia registrar mais os momentos importantes do próximo ano e que eu iria largar de vez essa ideia de que interromper um acontecimento para registrar em uma fotografia, vídeo ou um story de instagram representava o esvaziamento da emoção que eu estivesse vivendo naquel momento especial. a ideia de que “quem vive, não posta” havia perdido o sentido para mim e um ano depois, permaneço com o sentimento.
como janet diz aqui, a memória possui inconsistências e pode vir a mudar com o passar dos anos e o registro por fotos ou anotações é o que mais vai nos aproximar de um momento especial, de como as pessoas estavam se sentindo, funcionando como uma forma de manter nossa memória viva, verdadeira e presente por muito e muito tempo.
ter esse livro em mãos hoje significa o mundo para mim, ainda mais quando penso em como ele chegou até a mim e como eu estava me sentindo lendo o livro. eu só sei que eu senti que janet sentou ao meu lado e conversou comigo por um dia inteiro sobre a sua vida e me disse exatamente o que eu precisava fazer para me sentir melhor: registrar.
como janet diz aqui, a memória possui inconsistências e pode vir a mudar com o passar dos anos e o registro por fotos ou anotações é o que mais vai nos aproximar de um momento especial, de como as pessoas estavam se sentindo, funcionando como uma forma de manter nossa memória viva, verdadeira e presente por muito e muito tempo.
ter esse livro em mãos hoje significa o mundo para mim, ainda mais quando penso em como ele chegou até a mim e como eu estava me sentindo lendo o livro. eu só sei que eu senti que janet sentou ao meu lado e conversou comigo por um dia inteiro sobre a sua vida e me disse exatamente o que eu precisava fazer para me sentir melhor: registrar.
January 1, 2025
I am a sucker for photographs. Incorporate them into a book, and I have to check it out. I had never heard of writer, photographer and journalist Janet Malcolm, but when this collection of essays was posthumously published and favorably reviewed, it caught my attention.
Janet Malcolm was a long-time writer and journalist for the New Yorker, and she viewed Still Pictures as a quasi autobiography. In the book, she has selected photographs, often old family photographs, to begin each essay. They are somewhat chronological, mostly after her family’s escape from Czechoslovakia in 1939 and resettlement in New York. There she lived among a Czech community, some Jewish like her family, but many not. The photographs are very common, and similar to those found in boxes put away by ordinary families. Malcolm, however, weaves many engaging stories from these simple photos. In one she states correctly,
“In literature interesting things happen to interesting people; in life, more often than not, interesting things happen to uninteresting people.”
Many of the stories recount the emigre’s experience, principally of other Czechs. The final chapters are tied more closely to her personal experiences, especially concerning a long running libel trial. Not many people have read this book - my library system has eight copies, and none checked out. I purchased my Kindle version in a pre-Holiday “daily deal”, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it!
Janet Malcolm was a long-time writer and journalist for the New Yorker, and she viewed Still Pictures as a quasi autobiography. In the book, she has selected photographs, often old family photographs, to begin each essay. They are somewhat chronological, mostly after her family’s escape from Czechoslovakia in 1939 and resettlement in New York. There she lived among a Czech community, some Jewish like her family, but many not. The photographs are very common, and similar to those found in boxes put away by ordinary families. Malcolm, however, weaves many engaging stories from these simple photos. In one she states correctly,
“In literature interesting things happen to interesting people; in life, more often than not, interesting things happen to uninteresting people.”
Many of the stories recount the emigre’s experience, principally of other Czechs. The final chapters are tied more closely to her personal experiences, especially concerning a long running libel trial. Not many people have read this book - my library system has eight copies, and none checked out. I purchased my Kindle version in a pre-Holiday “daily deal”, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it!
March 31, 2023
A really fine and of course very thoughtful mini-memoir by Janet Malcolm, organized around a couple dozen photographs of her, her family, and friends and associates, mostly from her childhood. I always loved her New Yorker articles, and I’m sorry that she’s no longer with us.
I suspect this was in some way her intention, but sadly the photos themselves are printed as very small reproductions in the book. I’m sure the original photos weren’t great, but I wish they’d tried a little harder to reproduce them in the book so the reader could get more details. I suspect Malcolm would want readers to focus more on the text, which I was happy to do - but I regret that the pictures as printed are tiny and indistinct.
But the writing is great, fun to read, and her personality really comes through.
I suspect this was in some way her intention, but sadly the photos themselves are printed as very small reproductions in the book. I’m sure the original photos weren’t great, but I wish they’d tried a little harder to reproduce them in the book so the reader could get more details. I suspect Malcolm would want readers to focus more on the text, which I was happy to do - but I regret that the pictures as printed are tiny and indistinct.
But the writing is great, fun to read, and her personality really comes through.
March 30, 2023
I found this fascinating and compelling. Malcolm was neither proponent nor believer in memoir or autobiography and although she appears in her various long-form work, her "I" in those pieces is always very refracted. Here, in her last work before her death, she approaches autobiography/memoir from a very different place - pictures - old pictures and what they spark by way of memory, into her parents' past, their lives in Czechoslovakia, their Czech friends in NY, her life here, and more. A reluctant memoirist capturing in bite-size pieces what she does recall.
July 23, 2023
Still Pictures happens to be the first book by Janet Malcolm that I read and also the last she wrote before her death in mid-2021 (the book is posthumously published). The first half of the book forms something akin to a memoir (or an autobiography, although Janet herself doesn’t seem to like the term). Instead of chronicling her life into chapters reflecting various stages of her life, Janet starts each chapter with photos and follows the photos with background stories about what they are about, who are the people inside those photos, and the relevance of the photos to her life. Janet’s distrust of autobiography as a form is very telling, coming from a journalist cum photographer who was used to the idea of describing other people’s experiences, having been a kind of amanuensis. She writes that memory is not a journalist’s tool, does not narrate or render character, has no regard for the reader. ‘If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious,��� she continues.
Her description of memory also triggers more questions with regard to photography, which could be said as a tool to assist us in retaining our memories (or even in these days and age, to manipulate memories). ‘Photography is naively believed to reproduce visual actuality, but in fact the images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same. Taking a picture is a transformative act,’ she describes. It goes without saying that photography is not the same as reproducing the actuality.
Janet’s view reminds me of Susan Sontag’s view in On Photographyas she explores the moral and ethical implications of photography. ‘To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.’ The actuality is being filtered, sometimes to serve the purpose of the person behind the camera lens, or unintentionally, which perhaps Janet’s distrust of autobiography seems to be about.
But autobiography is something personal, and Janet could be very frank and subjective in her descriptions of the people inside the photos. Her stories begin with the experience of her family emigrating from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1939, just a month before Hitler launched the Second World War, to the experience of growing up in her adoptive country as part of Czech-Jewish émigrés. As an émigré, her upbringing undoubtedly shaped her understanding of memory and identity. The experience of being uprooted from one's homeland and growing up in a foreign country creates a rich tapestry of emotions and reflections, which she artfully incorporates into her exploration of photography and memory.
She also frequently employs psychoanalysis, turning to Sigmund Freud, as she analyses the happenings in her own life. Janet draws parallels between the elusive nature of memory and photography. She reflects on how both media are inherently fragmented, selective, and subject to the passage of time. Janet brilliantly connects this aspect of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis, which emphasises the role of the unconscious mind in shaping our memories and perceptions. By doing so, she offers a profound understanding of how memory is not a mere recollection of objective events but a complex interplay of conscious and unconscious forces.
Throughout the book, Janet engages with the idea of memory as a construct rather than an accurate record of the past. Her analysis of how photographs can create false memories or evoke feelings of nostalgia and longing echoes Freud's theories on the reconstruction of memory. By intertwining Freudian concepts with personal anecdotes and astute observations, Janet adeptly illuminates the intricacies of the human mind and its connection to photography. One of the book's strengths lies in Janet’s ability to synthesise her personal history, Freudian psychoanalysis, and her profound knowledge of photography, which forms an interesting memoir cum essays (although it would be hard to describe it as an autobiography).
Her description of memory also triggers more questions with regard to photography, which could be said as a tool to assist us in retaining our memories (or even in these days and age, to manipulate memories). ‘Photography is naively believed to reproduce visual actuality, but in fact the images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same. Taking a picture is a transformative act,’ she describes. It goes without saying that photography is not the same as reproducing the actuality.
Janet’s view reminds me of Susan Sontag’s view in On Photographyas she explores the moral and ethical implications of photography. ‘To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.’ The actuality is being filtered, sometimes to serve the purpose of the person behind the camera lens, or unintentionally, which perhaps Janet’s distrust of autobiography seems to be about.
But autobiography is something personal, and Janet could be very frank and subjective in her descriptions of the people inside the photos. Her stories begin with the experience of her family emigrating from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1939, just a month before Hitler launched the Second World War, to the experience of growing up in her adoptive country as part of Czech-Jewish émigrés. As an émigré, her upbringing undoubtedly shaped her understanding of memory and identity. The experience of being uprooted from one's homeland and growing up in a foreign country creates a rich tapestry of emotions and reflections, which she artfully incorporates into her exploration of photography and memory.
She also frequently employs psychoanalysis, turning to Sigmund Freud, as she analyses the happenings in her own life. Janet draws parallels between the elusive nature of memory and photography. She reflects on how both media are inherently fragmented, selective, and subject to the passage of time. Janet brilliantly connects this aspect of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis, which emphasises the role of the unconscious mind in shaping our memories and perceptions. By doing so, she offers a profound understanding of how memory is not a mere recollection of objective events but a complex interplay of conscious and unconscious forces.
Throughout the book, Janet engages with the idea of memory as a construct rather than an accurate record of the past. Her analysis of how photographs can create false memories or evoke feelings of nostalgia and longing echoes Freud's theories on the reconstruction of memory. By intertwining Freudian concepts with personal anecdotes and astute observations, Janet adeptly illuminates the intricacies of the human mind and its connection to photography. One of the book's strengths lies in Janet’s ability to synthesise her personal history, Freudian psychoanalysis, and her profound knowledge of photography, which forms an interesting memoir cum essays (although it would be hard to describe it as an autobiography).
February 2, 2025
malcolm gebruikt foto's als basis voor korte biografische essays, niet altijd makkelijk of vlot te lezen. maar ik ben toch erg fan!!
January 22, 2023
“The past is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally.”
“We are each of us an endangered species. When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will ever exist again.”
“I would rather flunk a writing test than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.”
“We are each of us an endangered species. When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will ever exist again.”
“I would rather flunk a writing test than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.”
March 6, 2023
Non-fiction writer, Janet Malcolm, turns her biographical eye on herself as she explores, through a series of brief chapters and prompted by associated photographs, her family, herself and those around her. She reaches into the past to the time of the family leaving Prague for New York as well as navigating through events of her later life.
"I'm not sure that I am ready to write about my mother yet, so I will write about the peripheral Eisner/Edwardses instead as a sort of warm-up exercise. Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud?"
Unfortunately, Malcolm died before finishing this short and interesting work and as such it is bookended with an introduction by her friend Ian Frazier and an afterword from her daughter. I particularly liked the way Malcolm made me, the reader, look beyond the presented photos, drawing out the deeper meanings and stories hidden beyond. I admired the very personal intimate way in which she wrote and the wider questions she raised about autobiography and biography.
"Autobiography is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines. Like biography, it enlists letters and the testimony of contemporaries in its novelistic enterprise."
"I'm not sure that I am ready to write about my mother yet, so I will write about the peripheral Eisner/Edwardses instead as a sort of warm-up exercise. Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud?"
Unfortunately, Malcolm died before finishing this short and interesting work and as such it is bookended with an introduction by her friend Ian Frazier and an afterword from her daughter. I particularly liked the way Malcolm made me, the reader, look beyond the presented photos, drawing out the deeper meanings and stories hidden beyond. I admired the very personal intimate way in which she wrote and the wider questions she raised about autobiography and biography.
"Autobiography is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines. Like biography, it enlists letters and the testimony of contemporaries in its novelistic enterprise."
April 21, 2024
Took me just under a year to read. Where did I get this? I definitely didn’t buy it, though it’s new. Did someone give it to me? Anyway, a solid sort of memoir by writer, photographer, and New Yorker photography critic Janet Malcolm where each chapter is musings prompted by a different old photos she’s found. Fairly interesting look at midcentury Czech immigrants and general culture, and well written, but not ever engaging enough that I was dying to read it
September 10, 2024
A superb, if short, collection. I have not much more to say. Malcolm’s use of the objective, something fiction writers often fear, is what really coheres these pieces. I’m reminded of Sebald. In this way, NF remaining the key for me lately
December 31, 2023
Rounding out 2023 with a flurry of 5* books. An astute, elegant, and *funny* retrospective of a life lived to the full. Malcolm was a journalist, photographer, critic, daughter, sister, mother, friend, and a hell of a thinker.
THIS is what autobiography can and should be, facing up to the messy disagreements between memories, family lore, self-deception, photography, and diaries, other written testimonies etc.
Malcolm explores the tension between our experience as selves formed in community and yet striving for self actualisation, autonomy.
I didn't know much about Malcolm before, but after 150 pages I feel like I really got to know her.
The book's utterly compelling voice is testament to a life spent observing patterns of other's communication and refining her own.
THIS is what autobiography can and should be, facing up to the messy disagreements between memories, family lore, self-deception, photography, and diaries, other written testimonies etc.
Malcolm explores the tension between our experience as selves formed in community and yet striving for self actualisation, autonomy.
I didn't know much about Malcolm before, but after 150 pages I feel like I really got to know her.
The book's utterly compelling voice is testament to a life spent observing patterns of other's communication and refining her own.
August 31, 2025
A great, very slim book by the fantastic writer/journalist Janet Malcolm. These slices of memory, pulled from old photographs, are like perfect, sharply focused snapshots of a life and the random people and events that form us. She’s also funny and - on occasion - slightly nasty. But who isn’t?!
October 11, 2025
Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm was the book that tricked me back into reading since my long and dull hiatus. A gorgeous hobby muddied by goals and perfectionism was revived by the sensation that reading Malcolm’s words was akin to eating a delicious meal.
I picked out the book in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway, a location that, off the bat, adds a layer of magic to any potential purchase. Me, predictable as ever, ran for a cover with a woman, a camera and a byline that included the word ‘memory’. Like a dog that hears all of its favourite words in quick succession, I pounced, and this mysterious autobiography was mine.
The book can’t be spoken about without mentioning its lightning rod of a prologue. If anyone ever knows me as well as Ian Frazer knew Malcolm, I’ll consider myself lucky. A section usually skipped, made me more emotional than any chapter in the main body.
Malcolm recovered my love of reading just for the sake of it through the coarse intentionality of every word she writes. Her writing is chewy, moreish. Some chapters are twenty pages long, some a bare two. She writes no more and no less than exactly what is needed to portray the moment in time that is being captured. As her daughter brilliantly frames in the epilogue, Malcolm writes an autobiography like Cusk writes fiction,by drawing an outline. In her messy, unstructured portraits of the figures that entered and defined her youth, we begin to understand what her young mind deemed significant enough to remember. All we know of her own personality and beliefs is constructed through a mirror image. While it lacks the satisfying salience of autobiographies that give you a clear entrance into the inner world of their authors, Malcolm’s honesty in her incompleteness more than compensates, and then adds some. What for some would be hallmark moments in one’s life and reflections - romances, prestigious jobs, children - , are peripheral in her work. They are treated as a given, the scaffolding upon which she offers us painstakingly detailed accounts of the small moments that truly make up a life.
I picked out the book in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway, a location that, off the bat, adds a layer of magic to any potential purchase. Me, predictable as ever, ran for a cover with a woman, a camera and a byline that included the word ‘memory’. Like a dog that hears all of its favourite words in quick succession, I pounced, and this mysterious autobiography was mine.
The book can’t be spoken about without mentioning its lightning rod of a prologue. If anyone ever knows me as well as Ian Frazer knew Malcolm, I’ll consider myself lucky. A section usually skipped, made me more emotional than any chapter in the main body.
Malcolm recovered my love of reading just for the sake of it through the coarse intentionality of every word she writes. Her writing is chewy, moreish. Some chapters are twenty pages long, some a bare two. She writes no more and no less than exactly what is needed to portray the moment in time that is being captured. As her daughter brilliantly frames in the epilogue, Malcolm writes an autobiography like Cusk writes fiction,by drawing an outline. In her messy, unstructured portraits of the figures that entered and defined her youth, we begin to understand what her young mind deemed significant enough to remember. All we know of her own personality and beliefs is constructed through a mirror image. While it lacks the satisfying salience of autobiographies that give you a clear entrance into the inner world of their authors, Malcolm’s honesty in her incompleteness more than compensates, and then adds some. What for some would be hallmark moments in one’s life and reflections - romances, prestigious jobs, children - , are peripheral in her work. They are treated as a given, the scaffolding upon which she offers us painstakingly detailed accounts of the small moments that truly make up a life.
May 5, 2025
2.5. handful of pieces i liked, but i couldn't tell you which ones because i lost my annotated copy and had to borrow a friend's, and i was not going to go back and reread all that (but i suspect they were the ones about her childhood, especially the one about her family's sense of humor). but most of the writing in this book felt underdeveloped, like it was on the verge of saying something meaningful but stopped just short of it. very writer-based, didn't care very much about the reader (which is fine but just not my thing). more than anything, this book helped me refract my own memories through photographs. what charged heirlooms do i have? what is my family lore? interesting jumping off point but not super interesting (to me) in and of itself :(
April 30, 2024
I wasn't at all sure about this book for the first 2/3... I love Janet Malcolm's writing but she never brought me in nor made me care about the memories she relates through a series of family photos... until the last four chapters when a wonderful portrait of Janet Malcolm breaks through. The writing feels more spontaneous and there's an infectious energy that I wished had been in the whole book. The Introduction by her friend Ian Frazier and the Afterword by her daughter, Anne Malcolm, help the reader understand what a brilliant and complicated woman she was. Thanks to India for the recommendation!!
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July 15, 2023Ms. Malcolm combined her love of photography, her own writing and photography in her professional life with personal stories, family histories and cherished and not so cherished photographs from her own and her family’s collection. It engenders a warm but studied eye to who she and her family were in their past.
May 10, 2024
She lets us she the world alongside her and we learn so much about the world, her and ourselves because of it. She has an elegant way of pointing out the absurd in life and her observations on memory are a joy.
July 24, 2024
Thank you, Sharon <3
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