… and I’m back

This blog has been inactive for a while, due to several factors – not the least of which being that I started a new job about a year ago and have been busting my proverbial guts getting the hang of it. Whatever time has been left over from teaching, preparation and administration I have tried to channel into publishing projects, which means writing for the blog has been shunted down the list of priorities. I have decided to resurrect it, however, in a slightly different form, with shorter posts more in the style of regular (as opposed to ‘research’) blogs, where I will write short comments and notes on items of relevance to my project (which remains the focus of this site), such as exhibitions, publications and events that capture my interest and attention.

The Memory of Photography

Photography is a primary example of what Régis Debray would call a technology of memory. These technologies include writing, printing, painting, sound recording, computer code, and all the other ways in which we inscribe images and utterances in order to preserve and/or transmit them. Photography has of course since its invention, to a much greater extent than any of these other technologies, also been conceived as a powerful metaphor for memory – and memory has often been likened to photography. (Recall Oliver Wendell Holmes’s description of the daguerrotype as a ‘mirror with a memory’ or look up the cognitive science concept of flashbulb memories.) As anyone who possesses a family album will acknowledge, photographs are important instruments in the work of memory. In this project, however, I am also concerned with how memory functions as a crucial tool when working with photographs.