Family Ties: Recollection and Representation
8th (evening) & 9th March 2012
Senate House
Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory
Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Abstracts and Biographies
Keynote Speakers:
Sarah Miles
Sarah Miles' 2001 - A Family Odyssey: Ophelia's Version (2002, 50 mins) is a poetic elliptical film
exploring the hidden systemic powers of identification within a family constellation through four
generations. Distant but familiar ancestors haunt the landscape like screen memories and family
members collaborate to perform representations of themselves. A collage of family album; the
filmmaker’s father’s photographic archive, rushes of his unfinished film The Host; 16mm portraits,
music, voiceover and film clips including Apocalypse Now, Badlands, Belle De Jour and Breakfast at
Tiffany’s reflect a complex layering of narratives. Miles plays Shakespeare’s Ophelia as a bunny girl
in violet searching for material amidst a powerful dreamlike stream of drowned family stories and
screen Ophelia’s, Marianne Faithfull segues into Catherine Deneuve into Marilyn Monroe.
Representing Ophelia evolves into an investigation of the limits of memory, the nature of
storytelling, the boundaries of art and the imagination itself. Past present and future mix generating
new meanings. Through this process of constellation hidden forces are unveiled by Ophelia’s jaunt
through familial image-repertoire
(Film Forum, Los Angeles 2002).
Sarah Miles studied English and American studies at the University of East Anglia (1980-1983).
Miles' award-winning films combine fragmentary and evocative narratives of family and memory
with references from cinema and literature. Her films have been screened internationally as single
screen and installation works at cinemas and galleries and broadcast on Channel 4, Canal 4 and
BBC2. Screenings at international film festivals include Melbourne (Damsel Jam, 1993),
Transmediale Berlin international media art festival (Amaeru Fallout 1972, 1999), Oberhausen
(Magnificent Ray, 2000), Los Angeles (2001 A Family Odyssey: Ophelia’s Version, 2002) and
Rotterdam (No Place, 2006). Artist presentations include Tate Britain; Arnolfini UK, Pacific Film
Archive, Image Forum, Japan and Los Angeles Film Forum. She has lectured in visual theory and
film production at Bournemouth College of Art and University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and
Maidstone. She has received funding from the Arts Council England, BFI, Film London, the Film &
Video Umbrella and South West Media Development Agency. Her work is held in The Artists Film and
Video Study Collection at Central St. Martins, London and she is represented by LUX, London. She
lives and works in London.
Rosy Martin ‘On Looking Back: Photography, Memory and Forgetting’
It was the very paucity of what could be found within the family album that prompted Jo Spence and
I to begin our quest to open up the family album to critical analysis, investigation and performative
photography, through re-enactment phototherapy.
The fading fragments do still hold emotional weight, as well as possibilities for multiple re-readings,
changing over time. The performativity of speaking one’s stories in responses to the family album
images, and the acts of performance of the multiplicities of self and others within re-enactment
phototherapy offer different strategies for engagement with the image, and that which it may show
or occlude.
Yet – what of the need to hold onto the moment – when knowingly confronting incipient loss? How
might one use photography to reconsider the all too familiar and once taken for granted? As my
investigations shift from contestation through to reparation, the questions remain as to how to
represent that which is hidden, denied or deferred. In trying to find a language to address prebereavement, dementia, death, mourning and reparation, drawing from my own specific lived
experiences, I am, as an artist, aiming to invite the audience to find their own resonances and
reflections.
Rosy Martin is an artist using self-portraiture, still life photography, digital imaging and video,
dealing with issues of gender, sexuality, ageing, family dynamics, bereavement and reparation. In
her practice she aims to extend the range of potential meanings that lie within notions of domestic
photography and explore the relationships between photography, memory, identities and
unconscious processes. Working with the late Jo Spence, from 1983, she evolved and developed a
new photographic practice - phototherapy - based upon re-enactment. Her work has been exhibited
internationally since 1985, including The Photographers Gallery, London (1987), Tokyo Metropolitan
Museum of Photography (1991), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1998), Focal Point Gallery,
Southend-on-sea (2001) and Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007). She has held lecturing posts
in visual culture and art/photographic histories at Staffordshire University, Loughborough University
and Maidstone College of Art. She is a qualified psychological therapist. Her essays have been
included in the following publications: 'Stilled' (Iris and Ffotogallery 2005); 'Gender Issues in Art
Therapy', (Jessica Kingsley, 2003); 'Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy', (Routledge, 1997), 'What
Can a Woman Do with a Camera?' (Scarlet Press, 1995) and 'Family Snaps: the Meanings of
Domestic Photography' (Virago, 1991). She lives and works in London.
Marsha Meskimmon: ‘Of Mourning, Mothers and Chocolate: double infinity and the
affective gift’
This paper takes as its starting point an affective coincidence that set the course of what I will call ‘a
double infinity’. The double infinity is here a feminist figuration for the founding generosity of
subjectivity as it folds and enfolds, doubling back but never simply returning the gift.
The coincidence at the crossing of this figuration was a performance/paper delivered by Joanna
Frueh in 2001 as she mourned the loss of her parents. I organised and attended this performance
without being aware of the detail of its content. Likewise, Frueh was unaware that I had lost my
brother to cancer only five weeks before she spoke. Our mourning was coincident, yet the
performance called forth a further unfolding, a gift, rather than a response, and it is this that is the
movement of this paper through the fragile traces of my family’s album.
Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Loughborough
University and Guest Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Gothenburg
(2011-12). Meskimmon’s research focuses on contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on
feminist theory, and her publications include: ‘The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture
in the Twentieth Century’ (1996), ‘We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of
German Modernism’ (1999), ‘Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003) and
Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination’ (2010). ‘Women, the Arts and Globalisation:
Eccentric Experience’ (co-edited with Dorothy Rowe), will be published in 2012. With Amelia Jones,
she edits the series ‘Rethinking Art’s Histories’ for Manchester University Press.
PANEL 1: A QUESTION OF ETHICS
Dr. Deborah Schultz: ‘Representations of the family in contemporary photography’
In recent years the ‘biographical turn’ has developed in the social sciences, the use of narrative has
been foregrounded in history, and oral history is now an established discipline. The lives of ordinary
individuals, as opposed to major figures, are perceived as of significant value in understanding
history and society.
Photography plays a special role in this shift of focus from major figures to ordinary people.
Everyone takes photographs and everyone has had their photograph taken both in formal and
informal settings. For most, it is the primary means of self-representation. It has dual functions in
both recording and constructing memories, both individual and collective. As the family unit has
become dispersed, photographs provide a means of connecting in time and space.
The ambivalence of both photography and memory make them central to postmodern practices, and
artists, writers and filmmakers have used the photographic image to explore the nature of the
familial gaze as well as wider questions of identity, representation, history and society. This paper
will highlight the intrinsic dual art/document, emotion/science nature of the medium, as well as
photography’s mobility of meaning, particularly when combined with written text. It will study the
assumed naturalness of the photographic image and how this masks cultural and constructed forms
of representation. Works by Christian Boltanski, Thomas Struth and Chino Otsaka will be used to
explore the ways in which photographs often begin as intimate private images but may be
transformed into public sites of history, or into elements in constructed or partial biography.
Photographs form the starting point for the viewer’s understanding of wider issues.
Deborah Schultz is Assistant Professor of Art History at Richmond, The American University in
London and a Senior Lecturer in Art History at Regent’s College, London. Her primary areas of study
focus on word-image relations, photography, and memory in 20th century and contemporary art.
She is the author of Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue (Oxford, 2007) and ‘“The Conquest
of Space:” On the Prevalence of Maps in Contemporary Art’ (Leeds, 2001), co-author with Edward
Timms of Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold
Daghani (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor with Edward Timms of Arnold Daghani’s Memories of
Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor (London, 2009). She is a
regular contributor to Art Monthly and other contemporary art journals. She is currently working on
a book on art and memory, and researching a project on biography and photography.
Camilla Brown: ‘When pictures from home end up in the museum: perspectives on family
photography in contemporary art and the impact of putting them on public display.’
Family photographs have long had a core place in everyday photography, both snapshots and posed
family portraits. However it has also been a subject mined by contemporary photographers. What
are the ramifications and issues raised in the transition of this type of work from the private to the
public sphere?
This paper will consider two series of work by two artists who have taken very different formal
approaches when looking at their families. Richard Billingham’s early series Ray’s a laugh (1996)
intentionally taps into the snapshot aesthetic in its fly on wall style and printing methods. Sally
Mann’s series Immediate family (1984-94) adopts the language of fine art photography taken with a
medium format camera and printed in black and white. How do these different approaches alter and
affect the way the work is read and interpreted?
Although these works were made fifteen years ago, they are still the subject of much debate. Both
raise issues around the consent of the subjects, for Mann this hinges on the young age of her
children, for Billingham his father’s alcoholism. External factors have also affected on how the work
is read and seen, such as for Mann the legal perspective on how images of nude children are
classified. In more recent years both artists have returned to new work with their families and both
have significantly altered their formal approach to the subject. Both have commented on how the
backlash against their earlier series has affected them. Does this have wider implications for how
the family will be photographed by artists in the future?
Camilla Brown is an independent curator, writer and lecturer. She gained her MA in History of Art
from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. From 2000 to 2010 she was Senior Curator at The
Photographers’ Gallery and was previously Exhibitions Curator at Tate Liverpool. She regularly
contributes essays to books on photography and writes for specialist magazines, and sits on
photography juries. Recent published texts include ‘Cast’ on Dryden Goodwin’s work Steidl 2009;
and ‘Sally Mann: the Family and the Land’ published by The Photographers’ Gallery 2010. She has
contributed to a forthcoming Thames and Hudson book ‘Photography: The Whole Story’, which is
due to be published in 2012.
Emily Fuggle: ‘Sole traces of existence: The use of family photographs in the Life before
the Nazis section of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition’
The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum offers an introduction to Jewish culture and
pre-war life through the use of framed family photographs displayed in the life before the Nazis
section of the exhibition. In this paper, I would like to explore how the Jewish community is
presented through the display of these images in this area, and the different relationships at play
both in the making of, and in the looking at, this part of the exhibition. In this paper I would like to
consider why the images displayed were selected by the curators of the exhibitions, examine what
wasn’t selected or what isn’t told through the images, and further explore how both stakeholders
and visitors have interacted with the images, and how this has influenced our/their understanding of
the culture of pre-war European Jewry today. I will in particular investigate the relationship between
these images and their donors, which also might suggest a new methodology for what images of
pre-war Jewish life the Museum might collect in the future.
My study will draw on ideas of visual culture and memory and seek to give an explanation of the
different relationships individuals have built with these photographs. I would like to address some
critical questions in my paper which appear at the intersection of memory and visual culture studies
which might include, in particular, examining how a cultural memory of Jewish pre-war life is
created by the Museum, and what is it that is being remembered, or even memorialised? I would
also like to examine what power and meaning the images might have to their donors, and also to
visitors when displayed in their current contexts in these exhibitions: seeking to address the
interplay between the idea of the ‘conventionality of the family photograph’ (Hirsch, 2001) as
contrasted with the traumatic history told in the exhibition.
Emily Fuggle is Research Officer in the Department of Research at the IWM, with special
responsibility for The Holocaust Exhibition, working both on the development and research of the
exhibition’s content, and representing the interests of the exhibition to external parties. Emily also
supports the development of the Museum’s corporate research strategy, including organising the
Reappraising the First World War seminar series, in conjunction with Queen Mary, University of
London and King’s College London.
Emily studied French Studies at the University of Birmingham, and has an MA in Cultural Heritage
Studies from University College London, where her studies focused particularly on the representation
of trauma in a museum context. Emily was recently a speaker at a colloquium in Krakow on the
interpretation of Polish history in museums, and at a conference on oral history at the School of
Eastern European and Slavonic Studies, UCL and will shortly be presenting her recent research on
photography and memory in the Holocaust Exhibition at the ‘Beyond Camps and Forced Labour’
conference.
PANEL 2: LIFE HISTORIES
Dr. Anna Izabela Cichoń: ‘Family Frames, Memory and Autobiography: Doris Lessing’s
Under my Skin and Walking in the Shade’
In the 1990s, after decades of writing autobiographical fiction, Doris Lessing turned to contractual
autobiography and published two volumes of her memoirs--Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in
the Shade (1997). The first volume deals with her childhood and youth in Persia and Southern
Rhodesia; the second volume relates her life in England between 1949 and 1962. Lessing sees her
past, her crucial life-choices and her artistic, intellectual and political positions as shaped both by
major historical processes occurring during her lifetime (colonialism, the world wars, communism)
and by her ambivalent emotional attitudes to her immediate environment (her family and personal
relationships). The selves that emerge from the memoirs are strongly historicized, that is, as F.R.
Hart has it, “relative to time, history, cultural pattern and change.”
Included into the memoirs are Lessing’s family albums with her selection of family’s and others’
portraits, vernacular photographs and snapshots of everyday life. The photographs are neatly
organized into temporal sequences and thematic groups, and their chronological arrangement
imposes patterns upon the narrative Lessing weaves from her memories as they emerge in the acts
of remembering, of reinterpreting of the past in the present. Whereas individual photographs, which
are in line with the middle class aesthetics and ethics (P. Bordieu), communicate stories of family
unity and integration, Lessing’s verbal and visual texts challenge such an interpretation of the
images and reflect her strife to liberate herself from the family frames and the memories cultivated
by her relatives. The paper seeks to explore Lessing’s articulations and visualizations of her multiple
identities and her use of the album as a means of interrogating her relationships with her significant
others.
Anna Cichoń is a senior lecturer in English literature at the Institute of English Studies of the
University of Wrocław, Poland. She teaches survey lectures, monograph classes and MA seminars on
the twentieth century novel in English. Her research interests focus on autobiographical and postcolonial studies and the use of life-writing conventions in fiction. She has published articles on
modern and postmodern novels and is currently working on the use of confession and the
confessional mode in autobiographical fiction.
Suze Adams: ‘Communion: Oral histories retold, ancestral lands reframed’ (A
performative film made in response to the Isle of Mull)
The place that inspires Communion is S’Airde Beinn, a mountain located on the Hebridean Isle of
Mull (home to my maternal ancestors). The impetus for this artwork was the death of my
mother/the birth of my daughter and the starting point, a quiet performance to camera in the
shallow waters of the lochan at the summit of the mountain. The work was performed both in
homage to S’Airde Beinn and as a respectful prayer to my ancestors. This place was one of my
mother’s favourite haunts and it remains significant to me as well as other family members.
Communion is both a work of remembrance and of celebration.
Building on the concepts of dwelling and becoming, Communion examines issues of belonging and
identity and, in this respect, considers the inter-face between fact and fiction in connection with time
and memory. From the starting point of oral histories, for the past eight years I have been
exploring the island. On Mull I have been following in the footsteps of my maternal ancestors, both
literally and metaphorically; gathering information from family members, from friends on the island
and from the archives at Mull Museum; visiting and staying in places where my family once farmed
and discovering new places, telling new tales and learning more about life in this harsh and beautiful
place.
I have wandered and lingered ... hearing in my imagination the voices of relatives re-telling familiar
stories of picnics and gatherings, relating tales of friends and places, those whose names
reverberated throughout my childhood – people and places that I now know, people and places that
my children now visit. I recall stories of ‘Pop and Grannie’ and all the many aunts, uncles and
cousins that gathered together at any and every opportunity and configure in my mind a relay of
further narratives and interactions and wonder what these might add up to, what they might mean.
David Jackson: ‘Mediterranean (So Blue, So Beautiful): An auto-ethnography in pictures’
‘Mediterranean: so blue, so beautiful’ is a portfolio of photographs documenting an encounter with
my father and his house in Malta after the fact of my mother’s death. After she died I knew I would
have to photograph him. At the time I had no precise idea what this would mean, only the certainty
of an obligation, which began to impose itself on me. At the heart of this familial exchange lie the
immediacies of the Mediterranean, not only as a place of lived, everyday experience but also as a
projected space of home and belonging.
The cultural theorist Iain Chambers has recently proposed an open-ended understanding of the
Mediterranean as ‘a site of perpetual transit’, which invokes the continual movement of peoples,
histories and cultures between West and East, North and South, Europe, Asia and Africa. In this
paper I propose a close reading of a family photograph taken at my parents’ wedding in 1961 to
invoke the silent passages and journeys between the shores of the English Channel and the more
distant, other shores of the Mediterranean. In using Chambers’ postcolonial form of ‘history-writing’
as a starting point, I will critically explore the narrative power of family photographs in the telling of
family stories to pose the question: who gets to call the Mediterranean ‘home’?
‘Mediterranean: so blue, so beautiful’ is also a contribution to interdisciplinary discussions about
emergent practice-research projects which use more personalised accounts of the researcher’s own
experience. By embracing a variety of methodologies such as biography, autobiography, autoethnography, and life-writing, what new insights can be gained into an understanding of the
complex interplay between individual biographies and their geopolitical, historical and cultural
formations in an era of globalisation? How should we respond as practitioners and researchers in the
twenty-first century to what sociologist Les Back terms as the ‘oscillation between the near and the
far’? And what role can a decidedly autobiographical approach to the practice of photography play in
mediating this oscillation?
David Jackson is a writer and visual artist working with still and moving image. He is a graduate
from the Polytechnic of Central London and holds an MA Photography and Urban Cultures from
Goldsmiths. His practice includes BFI and Arts Council funded film and installation work, exhibited
and shown at national galleries and international film festivals. His short film work is represented
and distributed by the British Council. Current projects include a new film ‘Unoriginal’ commissioned
by ScreenSouth/Creative England as part of their Innovation Shorts scheme and 'Mediterranean (So
Blue, So Beautiful)', a photographic portrait of his father. He is a Lecturer in Media Arts at the
University of Bedfordshire and his current academic research interests lie with photography. His
essay ‘We Are Here: Camilo Vergara’s Invincible Cities’ is to be published in a Special Issue of
History of Photography (Routledge) in Winter 2013.
PANEL 3: SHIFTING TECHNOLOGIES
Jacqueline Butler: ‘The wonder of forgetting, collecting and assembling’
As we contemplate what the impact of the growth of digital photography will have on the future of
the analogue, apart from the fear of the loss of this technology, this period known as “postphotography” allows space for reflection and reinterpretation of chemical based photographic
practice, to prise photography from the position of facilitator, and create space for the medium to
‘speak’ for and about itself; by beginning to consider the narratives of, in and surrounding the
photograph.
As we begin to think about and focus on the space within the static, mute place that is the
photograph, thoughts shift onto the relationship the photograph has with time and memory. The
paper will explore stillness, time and memory through reflections on both public and personal
archive. My thoughts have been formed through my developing artistic response to and study of a
collection of photographs by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) held at the National Media Museum,
Bradford and my own personal family album. Both studies engage with my deepening interest in
photography and its effect on how time is measured, and understood and it’s effect on memory and
personal history.
The paper will concentrate on two works titled Impulse Gesture and The Other Side of Wonderland:
12 Backgrounds. Each series of work compliment and inter-relate one another. The work combines
details from glass negatives from the collection of Lewis Carroll photographs held at the NMM,
Bradford with fragments of photographs from a contemporary family album. The work contemplates
the relationship photography has in understanding not only childhood but in piecing together our
former selves, reflecting back and making sense of childhood memory and forgotten experiences.
The dual ‘collections’ of photographic works will invite thoughts about such things as materiality,
memory, identity, history, loss and wonder, especially as these relate to childhood.
Jacqueline Butler is an artist and academic living and working in Manchester. In her arts practice her
primary interests focus on reflections on time and memory in relation to the photographic and the
cinematic, exploring visual narrative and contemplations on the material qualities of the photograph
both in its analogue and digital forms. Through her practice she works with photography, digital
video, the artist book, writing and curation. She is a member of Manchester based PRG
(Photography Research Group), MADE (artist book co-operative) and IRIS (international Women’s
Research Network). Jacqueline is currently Pathway Leader of MA Photography and Programme
Leader BA (Hons) Photography at The Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University.
She was Honorary Secretary of APHE 2007-2011, (Association for Photography in Higher Education).
She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and also outputs her practice through
publication and conference participation (papers, workshop and artist presentation).
Dr. Nicky Bird: ‘Looking a gift horse…: Generosity and the Digital Exchange of Family
photographs’
In Locating Memory, Photographic Acts (Kuhn & McAllister, 2006), Martha Langford argues how the
family album, as a genre, has its roots in ‘orality’; that narratives are not fixed, and depend on the
relationship between storyteller and listener. She also observes how ‘the album’s removal from the
private sphere to the public collection tips the balance to inscription by cutting the performative
cord’.
While these cautionary words are directed to photographic albums in the museum context, they help
raise two critical questions for contemporary artists working with ‘found’ family photographs: what
cords are cut when the family photograph is moved into an exhibited artwork? And what
‘performative cords’ come with digital versions of analogue photographs?
My contribution attempts to map out the territory that lies between the analogue family photograph,
and other familial objects, as they move from physical artefact to digital counterpart. This is shaped
by recent experiences as an artist working in the field, where stories of collaborators prompted
during an art process, then become part of public exhibition in the series ‘Beneath the
Surface/Hidden Place’ (2007-2010). In this situation, the family photograph brings with it the
collaborator’s voice in either textual or aural form.
Whether in the format of a recorded voice or a scanned image, the transition from physical to digital
artefact arguably allows a certain generosity on the part of the collaborator towards the artist. The
exchange, however, also raises questions of authorship, in practical, aesthetic and philosophical
senses. Therefore I want to consider the digital artefact as a form of ‘gift,’ a notion that has been
investigated by across the disciplines of anthropology and material culture (Mauss, Levi-Strauss,
Hyde, Purbeck). This ‘gift’ carries ethical and political responsibilities directly connected to a living
subject and family memory.
Nicky Bird is an artist whose work investigates the contemporary relevance of found photographs,
the hidden histories of archives and specific sites. She is interested in a key question: what is our
relationship to the past, and what is the value we ascribe to it? Since her practice-led PhD at Leeds
University (1994-99) she has explored this through photography, bookworks, the Internet and New
Media. In varying ways, she is interested in creating artworks that make visible the process of
collaboration. These collaborations are with people who have significant connections to materials
originally found in archives.
In 2008 Nicky received a major Stills photographic commission for the project Beneath the surface /
Hidden Place, which toured across Scotland over two years before culminating in a book publication
(2010). Residencies, such as the Glasgow Women's Library (2009-10), and solo shows from Question for Seller (2006) to Archaeology of the Ordinary (2011) - have all played their part in
shaping Nicky's current thinking about the digital trace of the artefact. This shifts from eBay and
‘found’ family photographs, which were central to Question for Seller to more recent use of oral
reminiscence and archaeological methods within site specific installations. Alongside residencies,
exhibitions, and contributions to arts journalism, Nicky is currently a part-time PhD Co-Coordinator
at Glasgow School of Art.
Sylvie Prasad: ‘May Days: An Examination of mobile filmmaking, family and memory’
May Days (2011) is a short film exploring memory, belonging and autobiography. Mobile phone
technology is utilised in the film as a record keeping devise but also implicated in the formation of
memory for one Alzheimer’s sufferer.
May, my mother, lives in a care home in the New Forest, Hampshire, UK. I found that on my
fortnightly visits I increasingly turned to using a mobile phone camera to record our days out
together. Ordinary cameras proved to be too intrusive to someone who really never enjoyed having
her photograph taken. It also allowed for more candid filming of our trips to cafes, the beach, the
forest, supermarkets and the pub. The clips could be played back several times over the course of
each trip and discussed. In many respects they became a stand in for the short -term memory that
May, through Alzheimer’s no longer has. The clips became the foundation for this work about my
days out with May and the mobile phone became not only a recording devise but also a therapeutic
tool- for both of us.
The constant repetition of visits and filming, car journeys playing favourite music of the past,
recording the mundane and the every day and recreating shopping trips has helped to cement some
lasting understanding as to who May still is and her sense of belonging. For me, as filmmaker and
daughter, it’s given me a glimpse into a world prescribed through Alzheimer’s and helped me come
to terms with the loss of a mother I once knew and the gradual acceptance of who May is now.
Sylvie Prasad is a visual artist and senior lecturer in the school of Arts and Digital Industries, at the
University of East London, U.K. She has published work on celebrity culture, lifestyle television and
cultural politics. Her work as a visual artist has been exhibited widely including a residency at
Charlton Athletic FC (2000) as ‘Year of the Artist’ award winner, Shadow Cities (2004) and Night
Flight (2005) at Museum Man and the Institute of Visual Arts Liverpool, UK. Who are Ya? (2008) a
short film, explored mobile phone use, football, masculinity and belonging amongst young fans. It
was screened in 2009 for Filmobile/ Mobilefest International symposium and the London Gallery
West, UK. The making of May Days her current short film was featured in the BBC Radio 4
programme ‘Pocket Cinema’ and was selected for ‘Pick of the Week’ (January 2011).
PANEL 4: TRAUMA: WAR AND EXILE
Dr. Deirdre Byrnes: ‘Presenting the Past: Photography, Memory Gaps and Postmemory in
Monika Maron’s Family Story Pawels Briefe’
Pawels Briefe: eine Familiengeschichte, published in 1999, is a sustained reflection on the workings
of memory. Monika Maron attempts to reconstruct her family story brutally ruptured by her
maternal grandfather Pawel Iglarz’s execution at Nazi hands. In a climate of generational forgetting,
symbolised most potently perhaps by her mother Hella’s memory gaps, the author’s efforts to
present – and to represent – the past are invariably fraught with difficulty. Monika Maron was only
one year old when Pawel was executed. She can at best reconstruct his story, and that of his wife
Josefa, from rediscovered photographs and letters – ‘eine imaginäre Wiederherstellung’ is how the
critic Frank Schirrmacher aptly describes her task. In her essay ‘Rollenwechsel: Über einen Text und
seine Kritiker’, the author emphasised the significance of montage as a form of literary
reconstruction that made it possible for her to place past and present in constant relation to one
another.
Motivated by what she describes as a desire to mend retrospectively her fractured family biography,
Monika Maron probes at the gaps in her mother’s memory; photographs play a central role in this
process. Marianne Hirsch developed the concept of postmemory in relation to the children of
Holocaust survivors and explained that it is also applicable to other second-generation memories of
collective and cultural trauma. As she confronts familial trauma which her mother has repressed for
so long, Monika Maron uses family photographs to piece together her grandparents’ final years.
Drawing on Hirsch’s seminal work Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, this
paper will apply what Hirsch terms the photographic aesthetics of postmemory to the visual images
in Maron’s text: ‘the photograph’s capacity to signal absence and loss and, at the same time, to
make present, rebuild, reconnect, bring back to life.’ This paper will demonstrate that many of the
photographs in Maron’s family narrative occupy this dual role: they ostensibly promote recollection;
yet simultaneously testify to the difficulties involved in presenting the past.
Deirdre Byrnes teaches German language and literature at the National University of Ireland,
Galway. She was awarded her PhD from University College Dublin. She is the author of the
monograph Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context (Peter Lang, 2011).
Lizzie Thynne: ‘On the border: exploring a post-war Finnish family biography through
video practice'
Through the objects, letters and photographs left in her mother's flat, Thynne started a video
exploration of her mother’s life history as well as her own using these remnants of her childhood and
her mother’s past. The paper will use clips to explore Thynne’s approach to this work in particular
which aims to capture the projections and re-imaginings which inform her family’s and her own
recollection of events.
Thynne makes connections between an individual story, marked by forced migration and breakdown
and wider historical experiences of war and exile, specifically the displacement of the Finnish people
from the isthmus of Karelia. Thynne’s mother was born in Terijoki (Zelenegorsk, now part of Russia)
and her family was evacuated from her childhood home when the Soviets invaded during the Winter
War in October 1939. Her mother’s father, a member of an advance ‘Panzer’ unit was subsequently
killed in the Continuation War as the Finns, now ‘co-belligerent’ with the Germans, pushed into the
Russian territory of Eastern Karelia. The film incorporates the family’s diverse memories of these
traumatic events, inflected by the subsequent cultural memory of the war and its aftermath. The
need to placate Soviet paranoia resulted in what was known as ‘Finlandization’ and the surrender of
Karelia was one of the events silenced in national memory.
The approach to the narrative process in the film is informed by the writers on memory such as
Susannah Radstone, who reminds us that biography is both ‘the dialogic making of both the
biographer and the subject’ and by Pontalis’ concept of memories as screens that both reveal and
hide at the same time.
Lizzie Thynne is Senior Lecturer in Media and Film at Sussex University, Brighton, UK, where she
convenes the MA in Digital Documentary and supervises practice-led PhDs. Her work spans different
forms of critical practice, written and visual. She has published on practice as research, women’s
employment in television and queer representation. She made films for Channel 4’s gay
programming, including After the Revolution and Child of Mine, as well as working for galleries and
commercial television. Claude Cahun, the surrealist photographer, has been a passion for some
years; she completed the film Playing a Part; the story of Claude Cahun in 2004 and has written
several articles on Cahun and her lifelong lover and collaborator, Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe).
Leslie Hakim-Dowek: ‘The City that Exploded Slowly: Photo-text Series Mapping a
Personal Archaeology in War-Torn Beirut’
Leslie Hakim-Dowek will address her own photo-text series, which attempts to map out a personal
‘archaeology’ encompassing the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and exile. A parallel is drawn
between a personal tale and the many transformations of Beirut from a magical place to a war-torn
no-man’s land and finally to become a totally sanitised urban space. A process of mental mapping is
delineated marking the sites of violence, personal trauma and the ever-shifting boundaries in a city
seen in a constant process of erosion and dissolution. The foundation of Leslie Hakim-Dowek’s
practice stems from an engagement with issues of loss, conflict and the environment. Previous
series focused on themes of migrancy, memory and identity including several relating to The
Lebanon, her place of birth, and its history of conflicts.
‘The City That Exploded Slowly’ examines Hakim-Dowek’s experiences of the aftermath of war and
her many return trips to Beirut, which have punctuated her life since then. A parallel is drawn
between a personal tale and the many transformations of Beirut from a magical and chaotic place to
a war-torn no man’s land to finally become a sanitised space colonised by global brands.
A process of mental mapping is delineated marking the sites of violence, personal trauma and the
ever-shifting boundaries in a city seen in a constant process of erosion and dissolution. Interspersed
in this story of conflict are snapshots of our natural environment and how warfare brings into
sharper focus our abuse and schism from nature notably during the events of 2006.
Hakim-Dowek revisits a discontinuous history where each generation has known new borders and a
new language. A family album is partly traced by street-photographers’ snapshots, as in a timetunnel, along the seaside promenade capturing her parents in Beirut’s heyday, emulating western
fashions, forever in between two worlds.
Hakim-Dowek has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including the Impressions Gallery, NMPFT
Museum in Bradford and Mois de La Photo in Montreal. She has recently undertaken a public art
commission for The Photographers Gallery and Gulbenkian Foundation for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Hakim-Dowek has an MA from the Slade School of Art in Fine Art and her practice has progressed
into a multi-disciplinary approach combining photography, creative writing and oral history methods.
She has a broad experience of fine art and collaborative projects as well as community arts. She is
currently a senior lecturer in photography at the University of Portsmouth.
PANEL 5: REVISITING LOSS
Prof. Patrizia Violi: ‘Documentary filmmaking as elaboration of mourning: Family and
collective history in Un’ora sola ti vorrei’
In 1972 a young, beautiful and rich 33-year-old woman, Liseli Hoepli, belonging to one of the most
important bourgeois families of publishers in Milan, a married mother of two children - a boy and a
7-year-old girl - committed suicide. Thirty years later, in 2002, her daughter, Alina Marazzi, a
documentary director, produces a short one-hour film, the title of which “Un’ora sola ti vorrei” (“I’d
want you for only one hour”) (Dir. Alina Marazzi, Italy, 2002), is a quote from a popular Italian song
of the seventies.
This film escapes any clear cut genre definition: it is neither a fictional work nor a pure
documentary, and is at one and the same time a family and autobiographic narrative, and a
historical fresco of Italian society in a pre-feminist era, a painful, moving reconstruction of lost
family memory and a psychoanalytic path towards the elaboration of a process of mourning.
The film uses all kinds of found materials: letters, family photographs, clinical records, Liseli’s diary
and, above all, excerpts of home movies drawn from the immense archive of Alina’s grandfather,
the father of Liseli, reediting them to make an original montage. Alina Marazzi’s filmic enunciation
operates through the deconstruction of sounds and images: as Alina reads the letters and diary of
Liseli, lending to her dead mother her own female voice, the images were all captured by the eyes of
men: the husband, a friend, but above all Liseli’s father, who documented all possible moments of
what had to appear as a peaceful and happy family life. The dark, hidden side of this kind of lifestyle
is brought into focus by both the aesthetic and theoretical techniques of Alina, the daughter, who is
able to read into the mystery of a private story signs emanating from a larger public sphere, making
visible in an un-understandable death traces of a collective history of women.
Patrizia Violi is full professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Department of
Communication. She is coordinator of the PhD program in Semiotics of the University of Bologna and
the Italian Institute of Human Sciences, Florence. She is also coordinator of the interdisciplinary
research Centre TRAME (www.trame.unibo.it) at the University of Bologna. From 1990 to 2008 she
was Director of the International Centre for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies at the University of San
Marino. She is at present Director of the Centre of Memory Studies at the same University. She is
author of numerous books and articles in semiotic theory, semantics (Meaning and Experience,
Indiana University Press, 2001), and text analysis. She is currently working on cultural semiotics
and traumatic memory.
Marjolaine Ryley: ‘The Thin Blue Line/The Deep Red Sea: Artists’ Explorations of
Miscarriage and Loss’
This paper takes its title from a piece of work I made after experiencing my second miscarriage and
before my daughter was born. This video piece represents a moment ‘frozen in time’ where creating
art out of the horror of the experience became not a critically engaged artistic choice but a
therapeutic necessity. Despite having made work for many years that moved between the personal
album and the social document I had never before knowingly entered the realms of ‘art therapy’.
The photo-therapy work of Jo Spence and Rosy Martin gave us a way to understand the potential
power of photography in particular as a tool for interrogating the meanings of family and its
associated imagery. That this cathartic re-enactment in itself became the critical imperative behind
the work and the focus of subsequent readings encouraged me to re-consider my own work within a
critical framework.
Through an approach, which draws on my own autobiographical explorations of this subject as well
as those of a range of artists working across photography, photocollage, video, sculpture and text, I
examine this troubled and secret side to ‘the family’. By exploring and questioning the ever-fluid
boundaries between art and therapy I examine the ways in which ‘unseen’ loss may be remembered
and represented. Looking at imagery such as scan photographs, ‘home made’ ritualistic objects,
memento mori and ‘blogsites’ dedicated to expressions of grief and remembrance (reminiscent of
the traditions of Victorian death portraits) I also consider the interface between the materiality of
objects and the ethereal and virtual world of the web and its vernacular content. I suggest that
pregnancy loss may just be an unexplored area of ‘cultural memory’ a vast, unopened ‘vault’ of
experiences of ‘life at the edge life’. By examining our own, as well as differing cultural and historical
perspectives we might ‘look again’ at the significance of pregnancy loss, re-defining its cultural
status and positioning it as a valid addition to the study of ‘family memories’.
Marjolaine Ryley is an artist working with photography, moving image, text, object and the web.
She has exhibited and published her both work nationally and internationally including recent
exhibitions at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow and The Palacio des
Artes, Porto. Much of her work has explored family photography including her book Villa Mona - A
Proper Kind of House published by Trace Editions, Field Study 7 - Residence Astral published by
PARC and her research project The Last Picture Show (www.thelastpictureshow.org) a project
looking at the changing nature of family photography in the digital age. Ryley’s current project
entitled Growing up in the New Age is an autobiographical exploration of free school education,
squatting and ‘the counterculture’ (www.growingupinthenewage.org) and will be exhibited at
Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Street Level Photoworks in 2012 with an accompanying publication.
The Thin Blue Line / The Deep Red Sea is an ongoing body of work exploring pregnancy loss. Ryley
is currently a Senior Lecturer in Photography and Video Art at the University of Sunderland.
(www.marjolaineryley.co.uk)
Sarah Pucill: ‘Re-enactment as cathartic ritual in the film Stages Of Mourning’
I will show two clips from my film, Stages Of Mourning (16mm, 2004, 17min) with a discussion on
what the relationship can be between cathartic ritual and the filmmaking process as both maker and
viewer. Ritualised through performance to camera, Stages of Mourning is a journey of bereavement.
In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how
our relationship with the dead is made different through film. In the confines of a domestic home,
the film journeys through remnants of my lost lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire as I order
image fragments into a film. By trying to physically immerse myself into photographs and film
footage, or by restaging these, I attempt to keep alive through the medium of film, the past.
Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine
that didn’t stop.
The film oscillates continually between a then-and-now state, which moves between original
photographs or film footage and their re-enactment in front of the camera. The film was made to
examine the relationship between the illusion of the recently bereaved to believe their loved one is
still alive, with the equally illusory power of lens based material in particular moving image to
assume living ghosts. The sense of loss is conveyed through the focus on the materiality of the
various mediums that momentarily hold the lost lovers image: the grain of the large black and white
photographs, the shiny surface of the small colour polaroid’s that she holds in her fingers, and, later,
the loved one’s face on a computer screen, which turns into pixels at the click of a mouse, as her
image is zoomed closer in.
The weight of grief is balanced with the lightness of the film projection itself. As well as examining
something about the experience of loss, the film is at the same time is an examination of the
difficult relation between the sensory within our technological and technologically changing world.
Since completing her MA at The Slade in 1990, Sarah Pucill has been making 16mm films that span
two decades and have been screened at major international film festivals where she has won awards
at Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Atlanta Short Film Festival and Images Festival, Toronto.
Retrospective screenings have included Tate Britain, BFI Southbank, HMI Curzon in London,
Millennium Film and Anthology Film Archives, New York, l'Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts Superieure
with LightCone, Paris, PleasureDome, Toronto. Recent screenings include Tate Modern, De La Warr
Pavillion, Bexhill. Edinburgh International Film Festival, Montreal International Film Festival, Leeds
Independent Film Festival. This year the Lux, London published a DVD Compilation of her films,
available online and at specialist bookstores. Funded by the Arts Council of England, Arts and
Humanities Research Council, Film London and Carlton Television, her films are distributed through
Lux, The British Film Institute (BFI), New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Canyon Cinema and Light
Cone Paris. She lives and works in London and is Reader at University of Westminster and is
currently working on a project that explores the writing of Claude Cahun.
PANEL 6: ARTISTS EXPLORING THE FAMILY ARCHIVE
Trish Morrissey: ‘The Imposter and the Family Album’
My two series of works, 'Seven Years' and 'Front' attempt to subvert the language of family
photography; the understanding of which is imprinted on our collective, cultural psyche. We
unconsciously know how to read a family snapshot. We have all been subject and maker, as well as
viewer of this very particular genre of photography. When the compact camera comes out, we
pause and we pose. We pose the way our friends pose when we are with them, we stand demure
with our parents, the 'good' photos make it into the album, while the 'bad' photos get deleted or
shredded or lost down the back of the sofa. A good photo is one in which everyone looks happy, the
sun is shining and the sky is blue. A bad photo has closed eyes, a finger in the lens, a grumpy face.
Each of these series investigates different aspects of this photographic genre and its role in the
construction of family memories. 'Seven Years' deals directly with the family album and it's tenuous
relationship with truth and family propaganda (look, mum and dad were happy once!), whilst ‘Front’
deals with the act of photographing and with crossing boundaries and borders (both physical and
psychological) and about how our unconscious knowledge of the language of photography fills in the
gap between evidence and imagination. The reading of family photography relies upon identifiable
roles and positions. The imposters featured in the family album of 'Seven Years' and 'Front' are
based on these characters, yet in both series body language, gestures, and the dynamics of spacing
are more revealing of the fakery at foot, than physical attributes like or clothing.
Trish Morrissey works with photography, film and video. She has exhibited nationally and
internationally, including solo shows at Impressions Gallery Bradford, Pumphouse Gallery London,
Yossi Milo Gallery New York, Gallery of Photography, Dublin, and the Centre for Contemporary
Photography, Melbourne. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, USA, the National Media Museum, Bradford, and
the Wilson Centre for Photography, London. Her work has been featured in several anthologies,
including, Vitamin Ph, Survey of International Contemporary Photography, Phaidon Press, 2006 and
The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Thames and Hudson 2005.
Angela Kelly, RIT, Rochester, NY, USA: ‘Catharsis: Images of Post Conflict Belfast’
I am interested in how the photograph is as much a trace of memory as of reality. Photographs
resonate with me as repositories of history beckoning the viewer to a new understanding of place.
The concept of loss, memory and history has permeated my photographic work for over two
decades.
Initially personal loss and tragedy provoked a shift in my practice from a socially engaged critical
Meta documentary work, which addressed female identity, homeland, homelessness and the
contemporary family. No less critical than former projects, my work shifted to examine the nature of
the vernacular image itself within the context of personal and social history. This binding of the
social, historical and the personal within a fine art practice has played out in subtly different yet
complementary ways in a number of projects.
I have been photographing the urban and rural landscape to connect to their particular histories.
Photographs made recently in Northern Ireland speak to a post –conflict new Belfast landscape that
resonates with my memories of growing up there. Catharsis: Images of Post Conflict Belfast is about
the act of remembering. In this work I re-visit the notion of a family album photograph as a
repository of memory. I use vernacular snapshot photographs from my personal family album
mostly created by my father in Belfast, N. Ireland in the 60s, coupled with current conceptually
driven documentary images that evoke aspects of a city with a war torn legacy. Each image is
marked with its map coordinates as a reference to geographic methods of defining place. It is
through the combination of the snapshots, the documentary photographs of former ‘Troubles’ sites
of conflict, newly defined as tourists sites, juxtaposed with GPS mapping coordinates that the viewer
might get a glimpse of how photographic language itself both limits and expands a sense of place.
Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Angela Kelly holds an M.A. from Columbia College. She has
taught on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and the
former Manchester Polytechnic England. She holds a tenured Associate Professor position at RIT,
Rochester, NY, where she serves as the Director of the MFA Imaging Arts Photography program.
Collections include: The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, The Art Institute of Chicago, The
Mac Arthur Foundation, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Rockford Art
Museum, Illinois, Kansas City Art Institute, The High Museum Atlanta, and The Arts Council of
London. In September 2011, she exhibited Catharsis: Images of Post Conflict Belfast at the 3rd
International Photography Festival, Dali, China, where she was nominated for the best exhibit. She
has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, The
Focus Infinity Fund, Chicago and the Arts Council.
Hamish Gane: ‘200 Seconds: In Light of the Past. Long-exposure photographs, created
during the projection of family cine films, exploring a space between perception and
recollection.’
Through reference to the mise-en-abîme photographic images of 200 Seconds, this paper aims to
explore a space between the Bergsonian notions of perception and recollection. It is through
photography (as a means of remembrance) that we record our lives, however, just as photographs
are considered signs of presence, they may also act as evidence of absence. Following his death, I
inherited my father’s extensive collection of family cine-films, all of which he recorded and in which
he therefore never appears. For 200 Seconds, the small leather suitcase that stored these films for
over forty years is converted into a pinhole camera. Photography’s mnemonic standing is called into
question, as the harbourer of many implanted memories becomes recorder.
‘Two hundred seconds’ refers to the duration of a 50ft spool of Kodak Super-8 played at the
standard rate of 18 frames per second and to the exposure time of each of the ‘family photographs’.
The images are made during, and in the light of, the projection of one of my father’s films, then
printed to the same scale and dimensions as the projection screen on which the films were
repeatedly viewed on family occasions.
The work seeks to question our connection with family photographs and films, and with memory. It
also explores our relationship with the still and moving image, and with time; as (cine) film’s
established associations with the flux of reality and ‘the flow of life’ are juxtaposed with
photography’s association with stasis and death. Referencing Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of
cinema theatres, (similarly recorded during and within the projection of a film), it is hoped that
through an amalgamation of cinematic and photographic time, new life may be given to the
resulting images.
Hamish Gane is programme director for BA (Hons) Photography in the Arts at Swansea Metropolitan
University, where he acquired a MA in photography in 2003. Before this, he worked as a lighting
technician/designer for ten years with companies including the Royal Opera House and Channel 4
Television. Recent group exhibitions include National Eisteddfod of Wales, Fine Art Pavilion (2009),
Unreliable Truths: Transformation and Illusion in Contemporary Photographic Practice, Glynn Vivian
Gallery, Swansea (2008) and Sitting Room, Alsager Arts Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University
(touring show, 2007/8) and solo exhibition, Apron, Mission Gallery, Swansea (2005). Gane is
currently enrolled on practice-led PhD entitled, A Pensive Sadness: Photography, Melancholy and a
Space Beyond Representation. His work draws on an intuitive and contemplative response to ideas
surrounding family, memory and melancholia. Subjects such as birth, fatherhood and death are
cited alongside references to art history and an underlying philosophical inquiry into the nature of
the photographic medium.