Some new research on memory work has opened up, from reading Annette Kuhn’s ‘Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination’ (Verso, 1995) which I’m finding really exciting.
‘Memory work is a method and a practice of unearthing and making public untold stories, stories, of ‘lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretive devices of culture don’t work.. These are the lives of those whos ways of knowing and ways of seeing the world are rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated, in the expressions of a hegemonic culture. Practitioners of memory work may be conscientized simply through learning that hey do indeed have stories to tell, and that their stories have value and significance in the wider world. At the same time, as an aid to radicalized remembering, memory work can create new understandings of past and present, while yet refusing a nostalgia that emblams the past in a perfect, irretrievable, moment’ (p8)
On the ‘memory work’ entry on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_work) it says this:
“Individuals remember events and experiences some of which they share with a collective. Through mutual reconstruction and recounting collective memory is reconstructed. Individuals are born into familial discourse which already provides a backdrop of communal memories against which individual memories are shaped. A group’s communal memory becomes its common knowledge which creates a social bond, a sense of belonging and identity. Professional historians attempt to corroborate, correct, or refute collective memory. Memory work then entails adding an ethical component which acknowledges the responsibility towards revisiting distorted histories thereby decreasing the risk of social exclusion and increasing the possibility of social cohesion of at-risk groups.”
These two quotes have got me thinking about the radical potential for a participatory project on family photography, which embraces many of the ideas I’ve been investigating over the past months – reciprocity, exchange, transformation.
I then found this tremendous article by Annette Kuhn – ‘Personal and Cultural Memory: a Methodological Exploration’ http://publicsphere.narod.ru/Kuhn.pdf which discusses different autothenographic approaches to working with the family album. A whole new world of enquiry has opened up. Feeling excited and full of purpose.
