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Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination
Annette Kuhn’s work as a theorist of culture has won her a wide reputation for dissecting film and other images in books such as Women’s Pictures and The Power of the Image . In Family Secrets , she turns her attention to the deconstruction of pictures closer to home—photographs from her own childhood and images from her shared ethnographic past—to trace a trajectory from personal to collective acts of memory.
196 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 22, 2025
picked this up for my ee but decided to finish it for the surprisingly captivating essays.
"In acknowledging the performative nature of remembering, memory work takes on board remembering's productivity and encourages the practitioner to use the pretexts of memory, the traces of the past that remain in the present, as raw material in the production of new stories about the past. These stories may heal the wounds of the past. They may also transform the ways individuals and communities live in and relate to the present and the future. For the practitioner of memory work, it is not merely a question of what we choose to keep in our 'memory boxes'--which particular traces of our pasts we lovingly or not so lovingly preserve--but of what we do with them, how we use these relics to make memories, and how we then make use of the stories they generate to give deeper meaning to, and if necessary to change, our lives today" (158)
alright, yes, this is a long quote and the first bit is quite awkward, but i find the argument about memory's interpretative nature very agreeable. the stories we remember and the information we derive from past events are not "true" in any definitive sense of the word; that there is a connection between memories and the images we choose to keep because both are deeply embedded in our everyday construction of the self; and that our sense of the larger social and political world influences how we remember the details of our lives. so to speak, what matters is not what we remember (or whether it is true) but how we present and represent our memories to ourselves and the world. why do we remember things a certain way?
i like how kuhn ties the connection between memory, media & visuality, and identity, and she offers some interesting points about how family photo albums are both a process of creating a family as well as controlling the individuals within it... will definitely revisit this!
"In acknowledging the performative nature of remembering, memory work takes on board remembering's productivity and encourages the practitioner to use the pretexts of memory, the traces of the past that remain in the present, as raw material in the production of new stories about the past. These stories may heal the wounds of the past. They may also transform the ways individuals and communities live in and relate to the present and the future. For the practitioner of memory work, it is not merely a question of what we choose to keep in our 'memory boxes'--which particular traces of our pasts we lovingly or not so lovingly preserve--but of what we do with them, how we use these relics to make memories, and how we then make use of the stories they generate to give deeper meaning to, and if necessary to change, our lives today" (158)
alright, yes, this is a long quote and the first bit is quite awkward, but i find the argument about memory's interpretative nature very agreeable. the stories we remember and the information we derive from past events are not "true" in any definitive sense of the word; that there is a connection between memories and the images we choose to keep because both are deeply embedded in our everyday construction of the self; and that our sense of the larger social and political world influences how we remember the details of our lives. so to speak, what matters is not what we remember (or whether it is true) but how we present and represent our memories to ourselves and the world. why do we remember things a certain way?
i like how kuhn ties the connection between memory, media & visuality, and identity, and she offers some interesting points about how family photo albums are both a process of creating a family as well as controlling the individuals within it... will definitely revisit this!
June 30, 2018
In this beautiful meditation on memory, photography, film and history, Annette Kuhn reflects on how personal and collective memory are constructed and influenced by the cultural images that surround us. Her tips for photo-based "memory-work" are also great prompts for writers ;-) or, I imagine, any sort of creative work.
February 9, 2023
why are all books about memory/photography actually about mommy issues? see barthes
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews