Placing photography in memory studies

A commonsensical way of relating photography to memory is one that assumes that photographs in some way “preserve” or “capture” memories for posterity. A photograph album with the inscription “Treasured Memories” on the cover, or a Kodak ad promoting the camera “as a means of keeping green the Christmas memories” (Paster 1992: 138), are perhaps the most quotidian instantiations of this assumption. But the same equation can be found in academic texts as well. Thus, in their classical study of the significance of objects in US homes, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981: 67) summarize the significance of photographs as personal possessions by saying that, “obviously, photographs are the prime vehicles for preserving the memory of one’s close relations.” And yet, while it is hard to deny that much vernacular photographic practice is motivated by a desire to capture a moment to be remembered, this intuitive equation between photography and memory is not a ref lection of anything that is inherent or inevitable to the act of photography, but is rather itself a product of a particular history. Exploring this history is one of the tasks of this chapter. A second, equally important task is to move beyond the simple memory-photography equation to explore the range of complex entanglements photographs, both as images and as material objects, have with the lived experience of the past. What is at stake here is not necessarily deconstructing the tentative link between remembering and photographic images, but rather questioning the static notions of memory and photography on which commonsensical assumptions of this link so frequently rest. This chapter covers a range of approaches that do not, at present, constitute a coherent field. Explorations that touch on photography as a medium of memory occur, indeed, in a range of disciplines. Scholars in visual and media studies, art history, communications, literature, anthropology, sociology and history all have an interest in how photographic visual representations both inf lect and inform remembering, but they often explore this question with the tools distinct to their disciplines, and in ways that seek to contribute to distinctively disciplinary conversations. The notions of memory that these studies draw on also range widely, from the more encompassing category of cultural memory that embraces all forms of objectivized archival preservation,1 to the more narrowly defined and necessarily subjective Co py rig h Ta ylo r & Fr an cis