ABSTRACT
This funerary photograph was included amongst vernacular studio family photos made by Charles Pansirna in Chicago’s Lithuanian-American community of the early twentieth century in the exhibition What Will You Remember When I’m Gone?1 My visual reading of the photograph is a combination of observation and speculation, a relationship I have created to it with a story a contemporary viewer might bring to a historic photograph. Vernacular studio photographs do inevitably invoke narrative invention. My free-flowing reading of the photograph is based on my own knowledge and experiences with family grief and the methods of portrait photographers;
my own associations and interpretations guide my reading. Margaret Olin proposes that photography’s “meaning is determined not only by what it looks like but also by the relationship we are invited to have with it.”2 What Will You Remember facilitated precisely this invitation. It extended an invitation to the gallery’s publics to define relationships to funerary photographs in the context of the genre of family photography. The exhibition primed the formation of relationships through the curatorial selection of works from the collection to establish a narrative through display methods that created associative connections between anonymous historical photographs and contemporary personal family histories, and through the formation of contexts within the exhibition that inferred its photos are receptive to being brought into viewers’ own knowledge and narratives. What I suggest here is that gallery space is public space with the potential to re-shape private narratives and, conversely, the public narrative being asserted in the gallery is shaped by private meaning brought to it.
