ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the activities of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic clubs and societies in Britain. It investigates the role played by photographs in the creation of symbols by looking at the ways in which visual images shaped the public memory of the Bologna massacre in Italy in 1980, when a bomb believed to have been set by right-wing extremists killed eighty-five people at a railway station. The book explores cases in which photographic images can be viewed as entangled with public memory. It focuses on Japanese family photography examines the patterned ways in which family albums construct individual and family pasts, using Richard Chalfen's extensive knowledge of US home mode photography as a foil against which to tease out the peculiarity of Japanese practices.
