ABSTRACT
Michel-Rolph Trouillot's description of the ambiguous mass of historical experience—a network of bodies, brains, and things over time and space—provides us with a useful entree to this discussion of the affective nature of photographic encounters with the material topographies of the past. This chapter considers ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century amateur photographers, who keenly engaged with the perceived subjective and objective modes of visualizing history, experienced spaces of local histories. It also considers the embodied mnemonic practices entangled in the photographic excursion or photographic ramble, which were organized by photographic clubs and societies across the country. The chapter summarizes the relationship between historical topography, memory, and identity. Places in existential space are foci for the production of meaning, intention and purpose of societal significance. Bender has argued that landscapes are cultural objects through which time is materialized, marked by a sense of time passing, both historical and mythical.
