Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums by Martha Langford (review)

366 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 collaboration with Burnham on these projects. Next, Burnham gives a brief autobiography and chronology of her work. Her story reveals a largely forgotten world of museum practice in which a lowly >second assistant draftsman= rose through the ranks to become a leader in museum scholarship. The articles in the major sections are layered with stories of the history of collecting and the history of Native peoples, as well as stories of collaborations between museum curators and members of Native communities. They also tell stories revealed by the materials, techniques, and styles of the garments themselves. These range from fragments of narratives that string together highly technical descriptions to Karen Wright Fraser=s engaging narrative of the spiritual journey she undertook to recreate a nineteenth-century Gwich=in caribou hide tunic. The volume=s research topics include distribution patterns, the cultural attributions of particular artifacts, the revival of >lost= techniques, and the relationship between function, design and meaning. Fascinating Challenges is an important contribution to museum scholarship for several reasons. First, Burnham=s diagrams and the analyses of Thompson, Hall, and Tepper serve as vivid testimony to the >engineering feats= of pre-contact Native garment design. Second, the volume=s contributions to the history of collecting are a welcome addition to a growing body of literature. Most important, this volume demonstrates the enduring value of technical analysis, which is in danger of being abandoned. Unfortunately, in their focus on >the object,= early ethnographers often ignored the contextualization of objects in their social milieu. Burnham and her associates show, however, that physical properties can reveal important features of social contexts. Moreover, the technical information in this volume has been crucial to >repatriating the skills and knowledge needed to produce these items.= As such, the projects presented in this book provide models for an >applied= museum scholarship that is responsive to the expressed needs of today=s Native communities. (CORY SILVERSTEIN) Martha Langford. Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums McGill-Queen=s University Press. x, 242. $49.95 At what point does a photograph lose its link to the particular? When do faces peering from photographic albums fall silent? For anyone interested in reawakening historical images, Martha Langford=s Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums will inspire your imagination and confirm what you may have always suspected B that there is a way to decipher the unspoken histories of the quixotically annotated album which has come your way by a circuitous route. Suspended Conversations is a scholarly book based on thorough research of the literature and exhaustive humanities 367 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 study of photographic albums in the collection of the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal. However, at the heart of Langford=s work is a poetic articulation of how one can get beyond a purely textual reading and bring albums back to life. To quote Langford, >Works of the imagination require the workings of the imagination to be received.= It is here that she presents new tools for understanding the contents of photographic albums. Langford begins her analysis by pointing out that what we are usually missing when perusing an old album is the person to perform the album, someone to bring it to life by telling the stories. Her thesis proposes that albums are essentially based in an oral tradition and not usually compiled to present a logical, chronological, well-documented history. On the contrary B by their very nature, albums tend to have their own personal and hidden logic. She points out that we are often lost because we do not know the most obvious things. Information that was taken for granted by the compiler and his or her audience went unlabelled. Even the following generations which may inherit this record find themselves at a loss. Like many of the McCord albums which Langford describes, the album we peruse may be an anonymous artifact. Langford=s work takes us through an extensive delineation of album categories with descriptive examples from the McCord collection. This section is thick with...