notes for project

Vernacular photograph:

social usage , non-art photography ,

comprehensible as they employ recognizable conventions, communicated through framing and focus, composition and cropping, posture and pose. At the same time they resist intelligibility because of their inescapable ambiguity

amateur photography constitutes significant evidence of lived experience.

The genre of the photographic album itself encodes a storytelling function

Visual autobiography

Self-defining narratives, forms of life-writing invokes genres of drama as well as fictions Remake their identities. Omission. The process of forgetting—that is, editing the extraneous or the unwanted, first through photography and again through album-making—begets a remembered self.

Three possible interpretive frames: Divergences between idealized and lived experience

Forget me not:

Holding a photograph within a photograph answers to the need to include the virtual presence of those who are otherwise absent

Those objects are not really about remembering, they are instead delicated to the fear of forgetting, or of being forgotten.

Represent their autobiographies in artful combinations of words and pictures. The subject of these bio-pic is often designated simply as “me”

Accuracy of likeness was less important than an overall atmosphere of prosperity and well-being Photography does not enhance memory—involuntary, physically embracing and immediate memory—but rather replaces it with images

Not being remembered at all: this has been the fate of the subjects of the most of these photographs. They are unknown for us.

Photographs have therefore come to represent not their subjects, but rather the specter pf an impossible desire: the desire to remember, and to be remembered.

It reminds us that memorialization has little to do with recalling the past; it is always about looking ahead toward that terrible, imagined, vacant future in which we ourselves will have been forgotten.

Regarding the pain of others

Something became real—to those who are elsewhere, following in as news—by being photographed

Memory freeze frame.In an area of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing

Both objective record and personal testimony

The memory of war is mostly local

Intention do not determine the meaning of the photograph

Photographic image, even to an extent that it is a trace, cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that somebody chose, to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude

Evidence of what