Oral History and Photography - (Palgrave Studies in Oral History) by A Freund & A Thomson (Paperback)

About the Book

"This essay collection explores the "photographic turn" in oral history. Contributors ask how oral historians can best use photographs in their interviewing practice and how they can best understand photographs in their interpretation of oral histories. The authors present a dozen case studies from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In exploring the intersection of oral history and photography, they complicate and move beyond the use of photographs as social documents and memory triggers and demonstrate how photographs frame oral narratives and how stories unsettle the seeming fixity of photographs' meanings"--

Book Synopsis

This book collects original research essays to explore the diverse uses of photographs and photography in oral history, from the use of photos as memory triggers to their deployment in the telling of life stories. The book's contributors include both oral historians and photography scholars and critics.

Review Quotes

'This international selection of essays would be a natural fit for graduate courses in oral history as well as memory studies. The introduction includes an excellent review of the historiography while suggesting ways oral historians can 'best use photographs in their work, ' and understand the 'interviewee's often perplexing responses to photographs.'' - Sound Historian

'The sensitive use of photographs by these oral historians has drawn fascinating, sometimes spellbinding, tales from both the tellers and the listeners. This is an important collection that will instruct and inspire future research at the crossroads of photography, orality, memory, and history.' Martha Langford, author of Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic

Albums and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art 'An evocative, much-needed international collection exploring the fascinating intersection between the oral and visual. Twelve pointed and diverse case studies, framed by an extensive introductory essay, map a surprisingly rich terrain. One axis involves reflections on photo-elicitation as a helpful but far-from-straightforward interview technique. Another involves issues of memory and interpretation in oral history, issues complicated in provocative ways by the counterpoint with photographic evidence (and vice versa). A third dimension, perhaps the most novel, demonstrates how enriched documentary and interactive possibilities for family, community, and public discourse can be unfolded through leveraging the productive tension between voice and eye, from representation to reception.' Michael Frisch, co-author, with photographer Milton Rogovin, of Portraits in Steel

'This is a terrific book. The collection addresses key issues in the correlation of the visual and verbal that are particularly salient as digital communication challenges the boundaries of many disciplines, the nature of history and oral history itself, and the possibilities for engaged oral history or advocacy and interpretive action. The book as a whole is remarkably well-written. It has the analytical grain and authorial modesty I have come to admire in the best oral history work. This collection will certainly complement and extend the emerging literatures on visual study, visual culture, new documentary, and 'sensory' ethnography. Accordingly, I expect it will significantly enhance the stature and reach of oral history.' - Della Pollock, professor of Performance and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

About the Author

ALEXANDER FREUND Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Canada.
ALISTAIR THOMSON Professor of History at Monash University, Australia.