ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between the making of collective memory and photography through an ethnographic exploration of ways in which photographs in a shop on the Greek island of Ikaria function not only as documentary evidence of the civil war era. The photographs are also analysed as pivotal objects in social interactions, especially in gift exchanges that shape people’s historical consciousness and collective memory. In particular, the focus is on how this photography shop acts as a locus for the making and keeping of memories of internal exile: of political exiles and their families and of the islanders who hosted them between 1946 and 1949, in the early years of political oppression during Greece’s post-WWII civil war.
