ABSTRACT
In touching on memory production, personal photographs have something in common with autobiographical writing: though if the activities of looking at and talking about photographs also involve a putting into discourse of memory, they lack the dimension of writing and thus perhaps the more revised public productions of self characteristic of conventional autobiography and even, in a different way, of revisionist autobiography. Memory work stages memory through words, spoken and written, in images of many kinds, and in sounds: the multifaceted quality of memory-expressions is reflected in different practices of memory work. Memory texts translate the psychical activity of warding off loss into the domain of the social. Memory texts are made, shared and remade in many different contexts: but it is perhaps the family that provides the model for every other memory-community. Everyday historical consciousness and collective memory do overlap in stories about the past, that past which falls within the timespan of our parents' and our grandparents' memories.
