Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums

Western Folklore, Fall 2003 by De Caro, Frank

Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. By Martha Langford. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. Pp. x 241, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth)

Photography has become a key ingredient in folklore fieldwork; there are few folklorists who do not record on film some of the contexts in which they undertake their research, thus producing images of informants, performances, or places. As a cultural document, however, the photograph extends well beyond our own efforts to create a record for our own research. There is a wealth of photographic images made by others, for various purposes, which encode cultural knowledge that may be of much interest to us. It then becomes necessary to consider how to interpret such images in order to add to our understanding of some context we may be examining. Martha Langford's Suspended Conversations offers insightful approaches to interpreting photographic albums, that is, to examining a certain kind of collection of photographs.

Of course not every context offers the possibility of looking at albums, but theassembling of photographic albums was a very popular endeavor in certain times and places, and where albums are available, they offer the hope of providing valuable information. I became aware of their potential in the 1970s when engaged in a project in historical ethnography that involved interviews with Britons who had lived in colonial India. A number of my informants had compiled photo albums for that period in their lives; in come cases these were meticulously assembled and maintained, often in rather grand albums. They not only served to provide me as an interviewer with a visual counterpart to oral accounts but also stimulated those accounts in the first place. I later bought from a dealer an album which I used in an exhibition because it demonstrated so nicely, via pages which alternated family life in England with the life of a family member in India, the fluidity of movement between metropolitan country and colonial existence.

What actually an album can reveal depends, of course, upon the album itself and what one is looking for. Langford's book is useful in that it gives us a number of analyses of particular albums and also a chapter on previous uses of albums by scholars (including those of the Smithsonian Family Folklore project) and artists. Langford sees previous attempts to look at the photographic album, whether by scholars, critics or artists, as having been overly concentrated on the "idea" of the album rather than on careful analysis of particular, actual albums. Her own book aims to get around that problem by drawing upon the large collection of albums at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. Folklorists, who themselves tend to be grounded in the concrete, will appreciate that approach. Her own analyses may not be directly helpful to folklorists, for as an art historian and curator she is primarily concerned with what might be called the "structure" of photographs and albums as they relate to memory, not with how images can best be read to reveal cultural data in a folkloric sense. Nonetheless her readings are often instructive in other ways and are worth looking at.

What will most interest folklorists about the book, however, is Langford's chapter that develops the connection between photographic alburns and orality (and a subsequent chapter in which an album is looked at in terms of the ideas just developed about images and orality) . Although Langford acknowledges the connection between albums and storytelling, she sees her main contribution to understanding the photography/orality intersection as the recognition of certain "strategies of orality" and patterns of oral communication in the structuring of albums. Basing her arguments particularly on Walter Ong's writings, she certainly is well informed about the literature on orality. However, whether folklorists will accept the assertion that "the idea that photography reactivated a condition dormant in Western consciousness, that it invaded the structure of literacy and made books-photographic books-systematically based on oral formula" (p. 125) is debatable. Although Langford writes of patterns of inclusion, organization and presentation in albums and sees this as a reordering of Ong's list of the characteristics of orality, one wonders whether, in terms of what she actually does with these patterns, she needed really to reference orality at all. Just because "formulas and themes, real-life situations" are "visible in an album" (p. 128), why does that imply a substantive connection with the oral tradition and exactly how? Folklorists may also be puzzled by such statements as "A kind of objectivity results (really a non-subjectivity) which is not the text's separation of 'the knower from the known' but the storyteller's separation from himself (p. 151); or that the photographs of a certain person during a certain time period "cause it [that period] to bubble up in legends that connect circumstantially to his life" (p. 139).