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

Langford, Martha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773521747 ISBN 13: 9780773521742

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Albums are treasured by families, collected as lively illustrations of the past by museums of social history, and examined by scholars in sociology, folklore, art history, and cultural studies 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 frustrating 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. "Suspended Conversations" brings to light a rich collection of photographic travelogues, memoirs, thematic collections, and family sagas compiled between 1860 and 1960 and held by the McCord Museum of Canadian History. Martha Langford not only provides a fascinating glimpse of a previous century's preoccupations and mores but brings photography into the great conversation about how we remember and how we send our stories into the future.

About this title

Review:

"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, author 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, Communication Studies, Department of Social Sciences, 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

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0773521747
• ISBN 13: 9780773521742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256