Constructing childhood and performing memories
“When you were a child you had to create yourself from whatever was to hand. You had to construct yourself and make yourself into a person, fitting somehow not the niche that in your family has always been vacant, or into a vacancy left by someone dead. Sometimes you looked towards dead man’s shoes, seeing how, in time, you would replace your grandmother, or her elder sister, or someone who no one really remembered but who ought to have been there: someone’s miscarriage, someone’s dead child. Much of what happened to you, in your early life, was constructed inside your head. You were a passive observer, you were the done-to, you were to not-explained-to; you had to listen at doors for information, or sometimes it was what you overheard; but just as often it was disinformation, or half a tale, and much of the time you probably put the wrong construction on what you picked up. How then can you create a narrative of your own life?”
Hilary Mantel, “Giving Up The Ghost” Harper Perennial, 2003
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/featu…
“Martha Langford, who works extensively with family photographic albums deposited in museum archives, argues in her book Suspended Conversations that people’s uses of (family) albums are governed by the same underlying structures as those of the oral tradition – of oral memories and life stories: ‘Our photographic memories are used in a performative oral tradition’ (Langford 2001, viii). Not only do photographs operate as props and prompts in verbal performances of memory, but the collection of photographs that makes up a family album itself also follows an ‘oral structure’: ‘An album is a classic example of a horizontal narrative shot through with lines of both epic and anecdotal dimension’ (Langford 2001, 175). This in turn informs the interpretive performances that accompany displaying and looking at photograph albums. Developing an ‘oral-photographic’ method, Langford has tested this through ‘performative viewings’ of archived albums, conducted both with donors/compilers of the albums and also with informants who have no connection with or knowledge of the families who figure in them. Her findings suggest that even outsiders will weave stories around albums, stories which embody precisely the epic, anecdotal quality that marks the memory text.”
Annette Kuhn,’Photography and cultural memory: a methodological exploration’: Visual Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, December 2007
Read the rest of the article as a PDF http://publicsphere.narod.ru/Kuhn.pdf
