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Reviewed by:
  • Oral History and Photography by Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson
  • Susan L. McCormick
Oral History and Photography. Edited by Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 270 pp. Hardbound, $90.00; Softbound, $30.00; Kindle, $27.08.

In Oral History and Photography, Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson have produced a thoughtful, complex, and wide-ranging anthology that enlarges and reframes the possibilities for using photographs in oral history practice. Noting in their introduction the ways that oral historians have written about and often used photographs as “documents of social history” or “mnemonic devices to stimulate memory,” Freund and Thomson make clear the value of earlier work, suggesting the need for “a systematic and reflexive use and interpretation of photographs” in examining the relationship between image, oral narrative, and memory (3). In this collection of essays, they showcase works that “are interested not only in what is depicted in the picture but also in how the producer depicted it, and how the interviewee as well as the interviewer use it in the context of oral history” (3).

The editors ground the essays in nuanced and complicated ways. Challenging the canard that a picture is worth a thousand words, they suggest approaches that will explore more thoroughly the relationships between narrator and interviewer and between image, oral narrative, and memory. Indeed, memory is at the core of these inquiries, whether stimulating, affirming, challenging, or creating the history woven from oral narratives. A recurring theme, repeatedly articulated in their review of recent theoretical work on photography, is the shift from the image as object of investigation to category of analysis, suggesting that the use of photographs is not neutral; meaning is shaped by multiple contextual factors for both narrator and interviewer.

Twelve essays, loosely divided into two sections, “Remembering with Images” and “Making Histories,” show the mutable and sometimes unexpected consequences of introducing photographs into the process of creating oral narratives, exploring and analyzing memory, and understanding the subsequent stories that unfold. As one would hope, images accompany the essays, more than sixty overall. Representing works from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the contributors are geographically [End Page 423] and methodologically diverse. Disciplinary frameworks include communications, sociology, art history, cultural studies, and more, each providing a different perspective and methodological approach to the oral history projects, an approach to the visual, and an examination of memory.

Essays in Part I explore “Remembering with Images” in different ways and with varying outcomes. In some, the narrator chooses the images in advance; in others, the choice is made by the interviewer. The photographs represent both public and private images, adding additional layers for consideration in the exploration of meaning and memory, as do unspoken expectations and assumptions of the interviewer. Contributors in both Part I and II note the importance of understanding not only when photos were taken, why, and by whom but also their changing meaning to the narrator. Family photographs are integral to more than half the essays, while images from archives, government sources, and news outlets are used in others. More than a fixed representation of a specific time and place, images are also discussed as artifacts for reflexive analysis and interrogation in conjunction with oral narratives and as useful tools to understand and explore the gaps and silences in narrator accounts.

In “Mary Brockmeyer’s Wedding Picture: Exploring the Intersection of Photographs and Oral History Interviews,” Alexander Freund and Angela Thiessen confront the dissonance between a seemingly happy wedding photo and a more complicated, difficult story of a pre–World War II marriage and life on the Canadian prairie. In separate essays, Janis Wilton and Penny Tinkler explore photo albums from differing perspectives. Tinkler uses photo albums that two middle-age women created in their teens to probe their memories of girlhood, the silences of memory, and unexpected memories. In her reflexive essay, Wilton recounts how she creates photos of objects that are personally meaningful to her and her family in order to cope with the loss of her mother and to create, share, and secure family memories for the future. Assembling a collection of shipboard photographs to show to...

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