Locating Memory: Photographic Acts

by Annette Kuhn (Editor), Kirsten McAllister

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.

Annette Kuhn is Professor of Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and an editor of the journal Screen. She has written about photographs in "The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality" (1985) and "Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination" (1995). Her most recent book is "An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory" (2002).

Kirsten Emiko McAllister is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She has written about photographs, visual culture and museum artifacts in "West Coast Line, CineAction and Cultural Values," and is currently writing a book on a memorial that marks the site of a World War II Japanese-Canadian internment camp.

300 pages, Library Binding

First published August 14, 2002

Reviews

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Locating Memory” is an edited collection of essays about the relationship between photography and cultural memory. The different essays emphasize that like cultural memory our reading of photographs is never static, but constantly transforming, influenced by many different factors, including history and society. The book therefore does not only concentrate on explaining the production of an image and the environment where it is currently stored, but also the afterlife of these images and their potential ‘reframings'. The essays focus on different case studies including family photos from Japanese internment camps in WWII-Canada and key images of the Vietnam war. Many of the essays concentrate on how to work with orphaned photographs, i.e. images where little is known about their provenience, production and context. Sometimes the readings and the contextualization of these photographs is enlightening, sometimes this is not the case, and the quality of the individual essays therefore differs a lot.