Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums - Softcover

Langford, Martha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0773533923 ISBN 13: 9780773533929

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008

Synopsis

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. Most agree that albums are stories that come to life in the retelling - 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. By correlating photography and orality she shows how albums were designed to work as performances and how we can unlock their mysteries.

About this title

About the Author

Martha Langford is the author of Scissors, Paper, Stone and the editor of Image & Imagination.

Review

"Langford's dedicated "reading" is transformative ... True to her word, Langford reanimates the conversation meant to be inspired by the album, but suspended by time Suspended Conversations is a remarkable book." CVphoto "The notion that the album is meant to be performed, or orally narrated is appealing and credible, conjuring images of older family members identifying, remembering and explaining, while occasionally digressing into extraneous personal and family histories for a younger audience Photographic albums deserve close readers like this one." Border Crossings "Langford's book joins those few exceptional works, by scholars and writers from Roland Bathes to Pierre Bourdieu to Susan Sontag, which move these meaningful documents into the forefront of communication and cultural studies. Her thesis that these albums contain fundamentally oral mnemonic and symbolic structures is both innovative and insightful." Pauline Greenhill, co-editor of Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada "This is a beautifully written work on photography and memory that at times startles with its poetry. Langford offers new insights into the understanding of visual technology, particularly as it breaks with a dominant scholarly mode that overwhelmingly tends to 'read' photographs as textual instances within a paradigm of visuality." Elizabeth Seaton, York University, Ontario Martha Langford...challenges the usual stress on photography as an exclusively visual medium in Suspended Conversations...Langford is also profoundly aware that a photographic album begins a problematic, second life once it is deposited in an archive...provide[s] preliminaries for an inclusive anthropology of photography that abandons, or downplays, aesthetic judgement. David Evans, Source, November 2008

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0773533923
• ISBN 13: 9780773533929
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 368