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For as long as collective memory has been an area of scholarly concern, the precise role of images as its vehicle has been asserted rather than explicated . This essay addresses the role of images in collective memory. Motivated by circumstances in which images, rather than words, emerge as the preferred way to establish and maintain shared knowledge from earlier times, it offers the heuristic of “voice” to help explain how images work across represented events from different times and places.The essay uses “voice”to elucidate how the visual becomes an effective mode of relay about the past and a key vehicle of memory. On the Boundaries of Memory Memory works through the various vehicles that give collectives a sense of their past.Addressed already in the work of Frances Yates,who showed how material artifacts in classical Rome facilitated the capacity to remember ,1 the material object has long been seen as a stand-in or synecdochic representation of larger events, issues, and settings. That notion has been elaborated by contemporary scholars; Paul Connerton, Barry Schwartz, and Jacques Le Goff underscore the instrumentality of remembering complex events through vehicles of collective memory.2 In particular, Pierre Nora’s notion of “lieux de mémoire,” or “sites of memory,” has helped demonstrate the linkage between the ability to remember and the places—conceptual and physical—where shared memory is lodged.3 This scholarship postulates that different vehicles of memory offer different ways of making sense of the past. From portraits to bodily habits, 7 TheVoiceof the Visual in Memory Barbie Zelizer collective memories take shape at the intersections created by the different vehicles involved, with remembering through public monuments assumed to be a qualitatively different experience than remembering through ¤lms.4 How these vehicles equip publics to remember thereby foregrounds different stress points in the memory work under question. Images are one such vehicle, the various forms—portraits, pictures, photographs ,¤lms—which constitute a cogent means of tackling the past and making it work for the present. But how we remember through images remains powerfully different from how we might remember the same event were images not involved. How Images Work Theories of visual representation have long been occupied with delineating how images work differently than words. Much recent scholarship has been drawn to the place at which words and images meet, arguing that side by side the cogent dimensions of each representational template emerge.5 Such an intersection has generated similar interest in scholarship on memory, where the entanglement of words and images plays upon the respective representational strengths of each memory vehicle. Indeed, the value of considering how images work by comparing and contrasting them with words dates back at least to the work of Gotthold Lessing. In his early essay on the Laocoon, he argued that painting differs from poetry simply because it “can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.”6 In other words the visual, unlike the verbal, might best tell a story by strategically catching things in the middle. It depicts for its onlookers a moment in an event’s unfolding to which they attend while knowing where that unfolding leads. This means that visual work often involves catching the sequencing of events or issues midstream,strategicallyfreezing it at its potentially strongest moment of meaningful representation. This point is crucial for explaining the role of images in memory. It suggests that images help us remember the past by freezing its representation at a powerful moment already known to us. Indeed, Lessing’s ideas are particularly interesting because we do not encounter images in contemporary experience devoid of other memory vehicles. Rather, images 158 / Barbie Zelizer about the past appear alongside other visuals, words, sounds, and artifacts in an array of settings—legal discourse, religion, politics, and journalism, to name a few. Individuals and publics thus often know more about the past than what is actually depicted in a given image, perhaps having read of the depicted, seen a different visual representation of it, or even visualized depictions associated with similar mnemonic schemata. An unusual relationship is created between spectator and image that positions spectators in the peculiar circumstance of knowing more than they see while positioning images between what the spectator knows and does not know. When it comes to viewing images of the past, of which at least some information...

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