ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how ‘place memory work’ developed across forms of visual culture in the 1970s and 1980s, a period that sees a generational shift in urban consciousness and the emergence of curators, for whom the need to respond to the traces of the city’s past (both from before and after 1945) led them to theorize how to ‘work with place’ in the production of spatial images through architecture, site-specific intervention, as well as photography and film. As this chapter shows, the dynamics of place memory can be generated through a direct encounter with the material remnant, but also through the indexical recording forms of the photograph and film, whose strategies for displaying the cityscape dovetail with the display strategies of material interventions.
