Family Frames: photography narrative and postmemory - Marianne Hirsch

This book was recommended by my tutor as part of my assignment feedback. It deals with how we relate to family photographs when we look and how looking is mediated through familial conventions and ideologies. The author goes on to discuss strategies that artists such as Christian Boltanski use to subvert these conventions when making art.

One of the most interesting chapters revolved around the architectural and curatorial layout of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. I was fascinated by the way that photographs rescued from family albums of Holocaust victims and survivors had been used to create a sense of people and place. As viewers moved through the exhibit they encountered the same photographs from both the perspective of the individual (using the conventions of familial looking) and from a distance to indicate that we can never imagine the actual horror or recapture lost lives; when we look at these old photographs and imagine who the people were and what was lost, we are using 'postmemory' to construct an unknown world in order to empathise.

The book goes on to explain the notion of postmemory using the experiences of children born after the Holocaust, that have no memories of the events, but have lived them through the re-telling of stories by their parents. Sometimes the postmemories are so vivid and so often retold that they seem more real than reality itself.

Postmemory as a term has also broadened out and includes art practice that makes work that sits in the disconnect between real and re-imagined events. The book goes on to talk about the ethics of making art via the filter of postmemory. Why it is important to recognise the disconnect to "preserve the shadows" and incorporate it into the work. This phrase "preserve the shadows" really struck me when I read it. It neatly encapsulates what I was trying to explain to members of the TV student group recently. I was trying (badly) to explain why I don't want to anchor my triangle work in a real location like a WWII site; and why I wanted the work to be partly anonymous or 'hidden'. By re-photographing my props and images in an anonymous woodland setting I am removing them from the documentary genre and acknowledging the shadows of postmemory.