ABSTRACT
The photographs that are shared through Facebook groups come from many sources, rarely identified. Many are from family collections and have not previously been made public. Writing some time before the digital transformation of popular photographic practice, Patricia Holland addressed the complex relationship between the personal and the social in family photography as a matter of interpretative framing. The public who encounter family photographs on ‘Salford Past’ have a panoramic way of seeing that typically looks beyond the individual human subjects in the foreground to the familiar landscape in the background. Common sense captures something of the essentially spontaneous, fragmentary, unreflective and contradictory character of these Facebook-mediated memory conversations. Most frequently the comments and conversations that follow the posting of family photographs of neighbourhood streets, buildings and landmarks amount to a filling in of detail and a mapping of the neighbourhood around the photograph.
