Memory texts and memory work: performances of memory in and with

visual media
KUHN, AF

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Memory texts and memory work: performances of memory in and with visual media
Annette Kuhn
Memory Studies published online 2 August 2010
DOI: 10.1177/1750698010370034

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 Memory Studies OnlineFirst, published on August 2, 2010 as doi:10.1177/1750698010370034

Article

Memory Studies
XX(X) 1–16
Memory texts and memory © The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1750698010370034
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Annette Kuhn
Queen Mary University of London, UK

Abstract
This essay focuses on re-enactments of the past through performances of memory both in and with visual
media, and looks at how these may embody, express, work through, and even unpick, interconnections
between the private, the public and the personal. It explores some questions around visual media/visual
discourses, memory and collective identity by looking at filmic and photographic examples from England,
Scotland, Canada and China. It also raises some questions around appropriate research methodologies
and about how institutions such as museums and archives may figure in some of these collective activities,
practices and performances.

Keywords
autoethnography, family album, film, memory, photography

The basic premise of this article is that memory is a process, an activity, a construct; and that
memory has social and cultural, as well as personal, resonance. As the sociologist Barbara Misztal
argues: ‘while it is the individual who remembers, remembering is more than just a personal act’
(Misztal, 2003: 6). Remembering is institutionalized through cultural means – in objects, material
culture (monuments, books, and suchlike) as well as through practices and rituals of commemora-
tion that may involve, but are not confined to, what participants actually remember from their own
experiences. Material culture and acts of commemoration may reference and construct a com-
monly shared past, and thus also communities of remembering. Furthermore, these cultural means
also frequently involve places, including – indeed perhaps above all – archives and museums,
places whose very raison d’être is social memory. There can, of course, be – and there commonly
are – limits, broad and narrow, to communities of remembering: family, tribe, ethnic group, nation,
for example.
It is impossible to overstate the significance of narrative in cultural memory – in the sense not
just of the (continuously negotiated) contents of shared/collective memory-stories, but also of the
activity of recounting or telling memory-stories, in both private and public contexts – in other
words, of performances of memory. The question, then, is: how may the past be re-enacted in the
present through performances of different kinds? These re-enactment processes are dynamic,

Corresponding author:
Annette Kuhn, Queen Mary University of London, UK.
Email: [email protected]

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2 Memory Studies XX(X)

interactive, and therefore potentially changing, in flux – contested even: there is memory, and there
is counter-memory. Performances of memory, moreover, can be – and are – enacted across a range
of activities, places, rituals and media. The central concern here, however, is with re-enactments of
the past through performances of memory in and with visual media, and with the ways in which
these may embody, express, work through, and even unpick, interconnections between the private,
the public and the personal.
Some questions around visual discourses, memory and collective identity are explored here
through examples both from cinema and from family photographs and photographic albums. In
relation to cinema, I shall set out a brief consideration of performances of memory in films
(through ‘mediated storytelling’), looking at how the past can be referenced through cinematic
means, and how the ‘structure of feeling’ of memory or the process of remembering may be per-
formed or enacted cinematically. Here the key focus is on what I call the memory text. Acts of
memory performed with family photographs and family albums will then be explored at somewhat
greater length as embodiments, as sites of construction and negotiation, of memory. How do pho-
tographs and albums figure in this way in private, interactive, collective and public contexts? Here
the emphasis is on memory work. Finally, some questions about how public institutions such as
museums and archives may figure in some of these latter activities, practices and performances
will be addressed.

Cinema and the memory text

As a cultural genre or mode that has expressions across a range of media, both visual and non-
visual, the memory text presents a number of characteristic formal attributes, above all a highly
distinctive organization of time. In memory texts, time rarely comes across as continuous or
sequential: for example, events may have a repetitive or cyclical quality (‘we used to ...’), or may
telescope or merge into one another in the telling so that a single recounted memory might fuse
together a series of possibly separate events, or follow no obviously logical or temporal sequence.
The memory text is typically a montage of vignettes, anecdotes, fragments, ‘snapshots’ and flashes
that can generate a feeling of synchrony: remembered events seem to be outside any linear time
frame or may refuse to be easily anchored to ‘historical’ time. In the memory text, events often
appear to have been plucked at random from a paradigm of memories and assembled in a mode of
narration in which causality is not, if apparent at all, a prominent feature.
Delivering, as they tend to do, abrupt shifts of scene and/or narrative viewpoint, memory texts
have more in common with poetry than with classical narrative. In the memory text, in other words,
structure and organization seem to be of greater rhetorical salience than content. The metaphoric
quality, the foregrounding of formal devices, the tendency to rapid shifts of setting or point of view
all feed into the characteristically collagist, fragmentary, timeless, even the ‘musical’, quality of
the memory text, which by and large possesses an imagistic quality that aligns it more closely to
unconscious productions like dreams and fantasies than to, say, written stories (Kuhn, 2002: Ch. 8).
Significantly, all of these attributes have to do with performance: the memory text embodies a
particular approach to, or type of, performances of memory.
These ideas can be further explored with reference to the opening shots of the second part of
Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas’s Trilogy, comprised of My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973)
and My Way Home (1978).1 The opening sequence of My Ain Folk, just over two minutes in dura-
tion, provides a good sense of the ‘feel’ of all of the three films, and as such repays close scrutiny
(see Table 1).

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Kuhn 3

Table 1. Opening sequence of My Ain Folk

Shot/shot sequence Description

1. Black screen. Film music.

2. Technicolor: two shots of Lassie, the second a view over lake (from the dog’s point of
view). Music rises to crescendo.
3. Cinema auditorium, showing film on screen and audience in foreground.
(Figure 1).
4. b/w CU Tommy, watching. Music continues. (Figure 2).
5. Four b/w shots of Newcraighall:
(a) Establishing shot showing road to pit. Music fades.
(b) Mine machinery.
(c) Men waiting at pithead. Silence. Lift arrives and they get on, silently.
(d) View of countryside from inside lift: framed inside film frame (cf. shot 2).
Sounds of lift machinery. Lift starts descending and view gradually obliterated.
6. Black screen. Lift sound continues. MY AIN FOLK. Three captions appear, one by one:
‘Granny died leaving Tommy and me to fend for ourselves’
‘Tommy had no idea where his father was but I knew where to find mine’
‘As things turned out I wasn’t sure about anything’
7. LS high angle Jamie’s house. Man (undertaker), on steps, another (a miner – Jamie’s
father) paces the street below.
8. Film music starts again. CU Tommy peers through hole in curtain. (Figure 3).
9. Tommy’s POV: cinema box office (‘admission 2d’) and poster on easel for ‘Lassie
Come Home’.
10. MCU woman in box office, dozing. Jam jars on counter in front of her.
11. As 8.
12. CU five empty jam jars.
13. CU hand (Tommy’s?) pulling curtain aside.
14. Jamie’s father on street outside house from high angle. Film music merges into bang of
mine lift.

The sequence can, of course, be read as making a commonplace enough point about cinema as a
temporary escape from grim daily reality. However, attention to its visual and cinematic qualities
deepens and complicates such a reading. This little story of cinema-going, set out extremely sparely
in a series of virtually static images, appears to be narrated backwards: we first see the film itself
and then the boy Tommy inside the cinema auditorium (Figures1 and 2); but the boy is next seen
as he appears to be about to enter the cinema (Figure 3). Whose story, in any case, is this? It soon
becomes apparent, for instance that the ‘I’/’me’ of the three captions is not in fact Tommy, the boy
who appears in the extract; and yet it is Tommy whom we see looking at the film within the film,
not ‘I’. Jamie, Tommy’s younger brother, is actually the central protagonist throughout the Trilogy.
Is ‘I’ therefore Jamie? Or is ‘I’ the director, Bill Douglas? Is the character, ‘Jamie’, Bill Douglas?
The titles of the films in the Trilogy suggest that they are about the director’s life: but if this is so,
in what sense is the Bill Douglas Trilogy autobiographical?
Writing about the Trilogy, the film historian Guy Barefoot considers the peculiarities of autobi-
ography as a cinematic, as opposed to a literary, genre, concluding that Douglas’s work ‘is autobio-
graphical rather than an autobiography’ (Barefoot: 2006), 16. This distinction stems in part from
cinema’s inherently impersonal enunciation: a sustained first-person ‘voice’ is difficult, even

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4 Memory Studies XX(X)

Figure 1. My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

Copyright British Film Institute

Figure 2. My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

Copyright British Film Institute

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Kuhn 5

Figure 3. My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

Copyright British Film Institute

impossible, to maintain through filmic means (see, for example Metz, 1982). As a consequence of
this, as Elizabeth Bruss points out, the ‘I’ of literary autobiography does not translate to cinema:

The unity of subjectivity and subject matter – the implied identity of author, narrator and protagonist on
which classical autobiography depends – seems to be shattered by film. (Bruss, 1980: 297)

To which it might be added that, to the extent that they recount an early life of class exclusion,
poverty and even trauma, as it were, from the inside, the films in the Douglas Trilogy are autoeth-
nographic as much as autobiographical. They speak from a place of otherness that sits well with the
impossibility of cinema’s point of enunciation being ‘pinned down with any certainty’ – an attri-
bute exploited to the full in those forms of ‘personal’ experimental cinema (marked by a fragmen-
tary, montagist quality and a non-linear temporality) characterized by Catherine Russell as
autoethnographic (Russell 1999: 311).
The opening sequence of My Ain Folk is in effect a memory text. As Guy Barefoot observes, it
is a montage of mostly static shots, and its portrayal of cinema-going is not located in any specific
time or place. He also notes that (again, very much in the mode of the memory text), across the
Trilogy as a whole, different experiences and occurrences are repeatedly condensed into a few,
minimalist, images and ‘there is little concern with providing a clear sense of duration or explanation’
(Barefoot, 2006: 24). There is, as we have seen, arguably no real cinematic equivalent to autobio-
graphical writing, largely because (as the ‘I’ conundrum in the Trilogy points up) the merging of
author, narrator and protagonist that characterizes such writing cannot be achieved or sustained
cinematically. On the other hand, memory – in the sense of both the substance or content of what
is remembered and also, more significantly, the process of remembering (its phenomenology, its

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6 Memory Studies XX(X)

‘structure of feeling’) – seems to sit well with filmic modes of expression. So, for example, the
fragmented ‘narrative’ throughout Douglas’s Trilogy – and specifically, as in the opening passage
of My Ain Folk, the uncertain relation between protagonist and narrator and its imagistic, back-to-
front narration – place the work closer to memory text than to autobiographical writing.
With its affinity to cinematic expression, as a performance of memory the memory text (as
opposed to autobiography or the autobiographical) appears to be capable of feeding readily into
collective forms of consciousness, and thus of engaging social memory. This is precisely because
of the very absence of an identifiable, singular ‘I’, an ‘I’ that combines author and protagonist.
This, in conjunction with the memory text’s characteristic vignettish, imagistic narration, shifts of
standpoint and indefinite temporality, aligns it with a form of engagement characterized by a sensa-
tion of recognition on the viewer’s part. Such recognition is not necessarily, nor even very impor-
tantly, of the content of the memory-story; it is rather a recognition of remembering’s distinctive
structure of feeling; and it is enabled by the space that the memory text gives the viewer. The gaps
in the story, the fluctuating or uncertain enunciative source, the ‘aesthetic distance’ (Caughie,
2008: 7) all provide non-identificatory points of entry for the viewer, spaces inside which her or his
own memories and processes of remembering may be activated, in a process of gathering the film-
maker’s particular, even personal, memory-images and memory-stories into a broader seam of
collective, shared remembering.
Cinema, in other words. is peculiarly capable of enacting not only the very activity of remem-
bering, but also ways of remembering that are commonly shared; it is therefore peculiarly capable
of bringing together personal experiences and larger systems and processes of cultural memory.

Photographs, photographic albums and memory work

Among the material forms in which cultural memory is institutionalized are objects that in them-
selves commemorate, or serve as reminders of, a past event or situation. Perhaps the archetypal
memory-object is the souvenir, a dictionary definition of which is: ‘A token of remembrance;
something …which reminds one of some person, place, or event; a keepsake.’ (Oxford English
Dictionary, emphasis added; see also Stewart, 1993).
As repositories of memories, reminders of persons, places or events in the past, family photo-
graphs and family albums may certainly be regarded as souvenirs. Indeed, while family photos and
albums can function prosthetically as substitutes for remembering, they are also used by their compil-
ers and owners as prompts for performances of memory in private, interactive, collective, and some-
times even public, contexts. The performance or enactment of memory in these instances takes place
with (as opposed to in) the photographs and albums. As with all performances of memory, this is an
interactive, even a dynamic, activity. A photograph or an album can be approached in various ways:
at one extreme, it can be treated simply as ‘evidence’; at the other, it can be interrogated for non-
overt/non-obvious meanings, producing ‘counter-memories’: memory work. As I have noted else-
where, memory work is an active practice of remembering that takes an inquiring attitude towards the
past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory. Memory work undercuts assumptions
about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, taking it not as ‘truth’ but as evi-
dence of a particular sort: material for interpretation, to be interrogated, mined, for its meanings and
its possibilities. Memory work is a conscious and purposeful staging of memory (Kuhn, 2000: 186).
Importantly, memory work calls into question the taken-for-grantedness or the transparency of
memory in relation to the past, and takes all forms of remembering, memory accounts, including
memory texts, as material for interpretation. The past may of course be narrated, re-enacted, or
performed across a range of media, both visual and non-visual; and the interpretive procedures

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Kuhn 7

used in memory work are necessarily shaped by the nature and the medium of the performance or
the text. While the objective may be the same in either case, ‘reading’ a visual medium involves a
set of procedures rather different from those for interpreting an oral reminiscence. Likewise, if only
because of the different temporalities involved – the contemplation of a ‘frozen’ past moment as
against the flow, the continuous present, of the moving image – ‘reading’ a still photographic
image is not quite the same as ‘reading’ a film.
Aside from this, photographs and photographic albums enjoy a kind of material existence that
films generally do not. Until very recently, moreover, all photographs were tangible objects, and
were therefore assimilable to a material culture. Moreover, one of their key features as cultural
artefacts is that they are regarded not only as repositories of memory, but also as aids to remember-
ing a personal or a shared past; though in terms of cultural significance and instrumentality there is
perhaps a distinction (to which I shall return) between individual photographs and photographs
collected together and mounted in an album. However, we may perhaps assume for the time being
that what the Canadian art historian and curator Martha Langford says about the album is also true
of the individual photograph: ‘A photographic album is a repository of memory. A photographic
album is an instrument of social performance’ (Langford, 2006: 223). As repositories of memory,
family photographs and albums work, in cultural terms, very much as souvenirs. As with the sou-
venir as both token of remembrance and keepsake, value is placed on keeping – preserving –
family photographs and albums, even (and perhaps especially) if they are rarely looked at. As
instruments of performance, their contingency and flexibility as to meaning is made more apparent
given the potential interactivity and contextual variability of the performance situation.
For example, readings of family photographs may in some circumstances deploy memory work
to engage counter-memory, unlocking levels of meaning that are not necessarily apparent on the
surface – as in Family Secrets (Kuhn, 2002), a book written as an experiment, to see what might
emerge from a scrutiny of my own, apparently entirely personal, ‘souvenirs’, from taking them as
a starting point for an interpretive endeavour of possibly wider than personal interest or value. The
book’s performances of memory with personal photographs allowed for the unravelling and explo-
ration of sequences of links between the personal contents, contexts and meanings of the photo-
graphs themselves and broader aspects of shared, social, memory and national identity.
Memory work of this kind can be effectively conducted as well with other people’s family pho-
tographs. Figure 4 shows a photograph belonging to a man in his early thirties, Yu Zhun (Jack Yu)
who grew up in the People’s Republic of China and moved to Britain several years ago to take up
a post with the British Council. It is a very small black and white snapshot with a deckle edge and
some writing on the reverse, showing a young woman holding an infant, with a building and some
trees in the background. In a ‘performative viewing’ (Langford, 2006), the photograph’s owner
explained that the picture was taken in China in 1979, almost certainly by his father; that the
woman in the picture is his mother and the child is himself at the age of two. The writing on the
back gives the date and the subject: ‘Our Zhun and mummy’ (Kuhn, 2007). As he spoke it became
clear that for its owner the photograph embodies myriad meanings about his own origins and the
period immediately preceding his own arrival in the world – a moment that appears to fascinate
everyone. For him, this conventional-looking snapshot is at one level about the upheaval of the
Cultural Revolution that came to an end just before he was born, about his parents’ roles in the
drama and trauma of that time, about the paradox that he owes his very existence to the Cultural
Revolution, and above all about himself, aged two, as a marker of hope and talisman of an as yet
uncertain redemption – for his family and for his country.
But this photograph carries a further – and perhaps more intensely felt – set of meanings for its
owner. These it acquired only after he had left home for university. At the age of 19 or 20, he

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8 Memory Studies XX(X)

Figure 4. Yu Zhun with his mother, 1979

Copyright Yu Zhun

recalls, he went back to his home city and spent some time at his parents’ house. He offers a vividly
expressed recollection of being ‘captured’ during that visit by this particular photograph out of all
the many others in the photographic albums kept by his parents. As Yu Zhun tells it, it is as if the
picture reached out and seized him, so that ‘I immediately said yes I need to get this one’. He
removed it from the album and has carried it around ever since. He says that he hates to be parted
from it, even though he rarely looks at it. For its owner, this photograph is clearly as much about
his life now, far from where he was born and grew up, as it is about his own, his family’s, or his
country’s past; though in a way these pasts and the present are folded together in his account, his
‘performance of memory’. He says on behalf of his mother as she was in the photograph, as she is
now perhaps, that the two-year-old boy is her ‘treasure’. And speaking for himself now, he says
that the photograph is his ‘treasure’. At several levels, then, for its owner this talismanic photo-
graph embodies something of immeasurable and almost incommunicable value, and it speaks of a
present as well as a past, or pasts. Souvenir and keepsake it certainly is, then; but the words seem
too weak to convey the depth of its meaning and degree of its value.
The performative viewing conducted with this photograph and its owner combines three meth-
ods for conducting autoethnographic memory work with family photographs: first, the interpretive
approach developed in Family Secrets; second, an extension of this approach developed for family
photography and memory workshops in which participants bring along photographs of their own
and work on them with others; and, third, an ‘oral-photographic method’ devised by Martha
Langford for work on family photographic albums. In her book Suspended Conversations,
Langford proposes that, both as repositories of memory and as instruments of social performance,
photographic albums are somewhat different from individual family photos. She does acknowledge
that individual photographs may operate as props and prompts in verbal performances of memory,
and that ‘our photographic memories are used in a performative oral tradition’ (Langford, 2001:
viii; see also Chalfen, 1987). But importantly, she argues, the album figures as the compiler’s
‘expression of autobiographical and collective memory through image selection, annotation and

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Kuhn 9

organisation’ (Langford, 2006: 227, emphasis added). In addition to this, says Langford, as a
repository of memory the collection of photos that emerges through the compiler’s editorial input
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). That is, as an instrument
of social performance the album’s organization not only constructs a story but dictates ways of
telling it as well; and people’s uses of family photographs and family albums are governed by
the same underlying structures as those of broader oral traditions such as oral memories and
life stories.
Langford has worked extensively with family photograph albums deposited in the McCord
Museum of Canadian History in Montreal, initially developing her oral-photographic method as a
variant of autoethnography: by conducting performative viewings of archived albums with mem-
bers of the families that donated them, she has explored relationships between orality, culture and
community in a particular social and historical setting, English-speaking Montreal in the first half
of the 20th century. More recently, she has tested her earlier conclusions about the interpretive
performances that accompany displaying and looking at photograph albums by conducting per-
formative viewings of family albums with informants who have no connection with or knowledge
of the families who figure in the albums (Langford, 2006). Her findings suggest that even here,
people will weave stories around the album, stories that embody precisely that epic, anecdotal
quality that, as noted above, distinguishes orality.
Figure 5 shows a single page from an album of 40 or more pages deposited in the McCord
museum. In this instance, its original owner/compiler (captioned ‘Me’ throughout the album) was
unknown, though it was clear from the contents that the photographs showed aspects of Quebec
family life in the 1930s and 1940s, a way of life marked by a ‘languid prosperity’ somewhat at odds
with the then prevailing economic conditions in North America. The page shown here contains a
group of six snapshots of ‘six or seven high-school seniors’ converging on a summer cottage ‘to
loaf around, sunbathe and listen to 78rpm records’ (Langford, 2006: 234). Langford interviewed
five women who were unconnected with the people in the album, but who did have connections
with Montreal and knew the places depicted in some of the photographs. All of the interviewees
read the album (as a whole) as a young woman’s coming-of-age narrative, and all, interestingly,
came up with memories ‘in common’ with the compiler’s ‘story’. While the subsequent discovery
of the compiler’s identity allowed an additional narrative to emerge from the album, Langford’s
experiment offered further evidence of the sequencing and links between performance, orality and
community. It confirmed that family albums figure as occasions for communication, cross-cultural
exchange and cultural continuity, and that there is something distinctive and culturally shared
about the discursive features of these image-based communications, of the kinds of talk, the modes
of telling, that accompany viewings of family photographs and albums.
Langford’s concern is with the photographic album as it survives as an artefact beyond the family,
beyond its original production and reception contexts, and with what happens to the album as a
repository of memory – a souvenir – and an instrument of social performance when it is translated
from the private or semi-private domain of the family to the public space of the archive and the
museum. This raises the wider question of how museums and archives may figure in memory work –
in activities, practices and performances of memory that involve family photographs and albums.

Museums and archives, photography and cultural memory

From an archival standpoint, the family albums deposited in the McCord Museum are of value
because of their relationship with the ‘collective memories of the communities for whom the
Museum has traditionally mattered and functioned as a meeting point’ (Langford, 2006: 229) – in

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10 Memory Studies XX(X)

Figure 5. Family album detail, McCord Museum, Montreal

Copyright McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal

this instance communities based not only on place (Montreal, and the province of Quebec) but
also on linguistic culture (Anglophone Montreal). As noted earlier, communities of remembering
may also be grounded, inter alia, in ethnicity: Kirsten Emiko McAllister, for example, has con-
ducted memory work with a photographic archive set up by Japanese Canadians in the aftermath
of their internment during the Second World War (McAllister, 2006). There is a dynamic tension
here between, on the one hand, a kind of broadly shared, if not universal, ‘code’ underlying per-
formances of memory and photographs/photographic albums and, on the other, the contextual
knowledges and affiliations that also feed into and inform the substance of performances of mem-
ory. For museums and archives that collect family photographs this tension can present both chal-
lenges and opportunities.
Figure 6 shows a page of photographs copied from a family album and deposited in the Docu-
mentary Photography Archive (DPA) housed at the County Record Office in Manchester, UK
(Linkman and Warhurst, 1982). It is part of a large collection of family photographs inaugurated in
the 1970s, when the city had begun its process of de-industrialization, with the objective of locating
and preserving the records of Manchester’s working people. The archival method deployed by the
DPA differs from the McCord’s, in that there are no original photographs or albums in the collection.
The Manchester researchers made copies of individual photographs so that the owners could keep
the originals, and contact prints were preserved and catalogued: in the first instance according to the
donors or families who deposited the material, and then chain indexed by content keywords such as
‘Celebrations: Coronations’. When collecting the photographs, researchers interviewed their owners
and recorded background information on donors’ families and donors’ own descriptions of the pho-
tographs and their subjects. These written records are also kept in the DPA: Figure 7 shows part of
the record kept for the donor of the photographs in Figure 6, Marjorie Robinson.

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Kuhn 11

Figure 6. Marjorie Robinson’s family photographs, DPA, Manchester

Copyright Greater Manchester County Record Office

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12 Memory Studies XX(X)

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Figure 7. Archival record for Marjorie Robinson, DPA, Manchester

Copyright Greater Manchester County Record Office

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14 Memory Studies XX(X)

Mrs Robinson’s photographs cover the period from 1898 to 1960 and are arranged in chrono-
logical order. They were collected, and the record was compiled, in 1981, and the photographs
appear in the illustration exactly as they are stored in the archive. There is no indication of
whether they were ever kept in a family album nor, if they were, is there any information as to
their organization, captioning, and suchlike. The DPA’s record treats them in fact as separate,
individual images. For example, for one of them (941/9) the researcher records the donor’s des-
cription as follows:

Percy Davies (left, donor’s father), aged 14, and his friend Freddie Chandler. The friends had this photo-
graph taken in great excitement because they were wearing their first pair of long trousers. It was taken
at Whitsuntide in 1927. Percy at the time worked at Ashton Brothers, Hyde, as an electrician.

Photograph 941/13 shows, according to the DPA record sheet, ‘Robert Cavill Robinson (Father of
the donor’s husband) holding the banner during a Whit Walk in Bredbury’. A little background
knowledge is required in order to understand the references to Whitsuntide. Photographs of Whit
Walks and Whitsuntide outfits figure recurrently throughout Marjorie Robinson’s, and indeed most
of the other family photograph, collections in the DPA, and constitute a record of the cultural sig-
nificance of a seasonal and religious ritual once devotedly observed, and clearly obsessively
recorded, by workers in industrial cities across the north of England. As the traditional time of year
for acquiring a new summer outfit, Whitsuntide was as strongly associated with public displays of
clothes as it was with religious observance. This remarkable testimony to a now defunct tradition
offers an intriguing potential subject for memory work and cultural memory analysis that explores
a culturally and historically specific set of interconnections between the personal, the public and
the ritual as these are expressed in family photography.
In relation to the potential uses of collections and records of family photographs of the sort
housed in museums and archives, the question of the auratic nature of family photographs and
photographic albums raises itself. The DPA, unlike the McCord, keeps copies rather than original
photographs and albums. How do such different practices of collection, storage, preservation and
cataloguing impact on the nature and potential of museum and archive photography collections as
research resources? In the case of the DPA it is clear that autoethnographic work, via performative
viewings, took place during the fieldwork that was conducted when the photographs were ori-
ginally collected. Moreover, as noted, this information is carefully documented in the archival
notes that accompany each collection. As source materials these copies of family photographs and
the notes accompanying them, taken together, open up research possibilities rather different from
those offered by the albums of original photographs archived in the McCord museum – a point that
must have implications for research methodology.
Inquiry into personal and domestic photography and memory can, as we have seen, unlock
doors to understanding not only the ethnography of everyday memory talk but also the workings
of cultural memory across wider social-historical spheres. This it achieves through activating a
range of potentially interlocking methodological approaches towards a set of similar phenomena:
first of all, by a concern with orality and memory as a form of storytelling prompted by the en-
semble and sequencing of images in photographic albums that belong to neither researcher nor
informants; second, through an ethnographic tracking of people’s practices centring around the
content, the production, and the everyday uses of their own family photographs; and, third, through
a practice of memory work that makes close attention to singular family and personal photographs
the starting point for inquiries that may radiate outwards from the image, eventually to embrace
ever broader cultural, social, and even historical, issues.

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Kuhn 15

Conclusion
This article has focussed on re-enactments of the past through performances of memory both in and
with visual media, and has considered how these may embody, express, work through and unpick,
interconnections at the level of remembrance between the private, the public and the personal.
Through an exploration of questions around visual media, memory and collective forms of remem-
bering through filmic and photographic examples from England, Scotland, Canada and China, it has
also explored approaches to reading memory texts and proposed a set of research methodologies for
memory work. Finally, it has touched on the role that public institutions such as museums and
archives might play in these collective activities, practices and performances.
The memory texts and performances of memory discussed here indicate some of the ways in
which visual media – and especially everyday visual media such as film and photography – engage,
produce and embody distinctive kinds of memory-stories and narrative discourses. They also sug-
gest how research into such acts of memory may benefit from the development of new and distinc-
tive methodological protocols. Through the interpretive, interactive, intersubjective, ethnographic
and autoethnographic methodologies set out in this article, sequences of relations between the
personal and the collective may be unravelled and examined in a manner that is both scientifically
robust and, crucially, meaningful to those involved.

Acknowledgement
This is an extended version of a paper delivered at Memoria Media, a symposium organized in December
2008 by Museo Storico del Trentino, and published as ‘Memorie e lavoro della memoria: rappresentazioni
della memoria nei e con i media visuali’, in Daniela Cecchin and Matteo Gentilini (eds), Collana: Quaderni
di Archivio Trentino – La memoria strappata. Contese e (con)testi. Trento: Fondazione Museo Storico del
Trentino, 2009.

Note
1 After many years of unavailability, the Bill Douglas Trilogy was reissued by the British Film Institute as
a DVD in 2008.

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Author biography
Annette Kuhn is Professor of Film Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen
Mary, University of London, UK, and a longstanding editor of the journal Screen. Her books include:
Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (Verso, 1995 and 2002), An Everyday Magic:
Cinema and Cultural Memory (I.B. Tauris, 2002), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (co-edited
with Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Berghahn Books, 2006); Ratcatcher (British Film Institute, 2008)
and Screen Theorizing Today: a Celebration of Screen’s 50th Anniversary (edited, 2009).

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