Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors: Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton

International Advisory Board: Steven Brown, University of Leicester, UK, Mary Carruthers, New York Uni-versity, USA, Paul Connerton, University of Cambridge, UK, Astrid Erll, University of Wuppertal, Germany,Robyn Fivush, Emory University, USA, Tilmann Habermas, University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany,Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia, USA, Susannah Radstone, University of East London, UK, Ann Rigney,Utrecht University, Netherlands.

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from con-cern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we rememberit’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over decliningpowers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and thedevelopment of trauma narratives in reshaping the past.

These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirtyyears. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why peopleand societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematicstudy? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Titles include:

Matthew AllenTHE LABOUR OF MEMORYMemorial Culture and 7/7

Silke Arnold-de SimineMEDIATING MEMORY IN THE MUSEUMEmpathy, Trauma, Nostalgia

Rebecca BramallTHE CULTURAL POLITICS OF AUSTERITYPast and Present in Austere Times

Lucy BondFRAMES OF MEMORY AFTER 9/11Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law

Nataliya DanilovaTHE POLITICS OF WAR COMMEMORATION IN THE UK AND RUSSIA

Irit DekelMEDIATION AT THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN

Nina FischerMEMORY WORKThe Second Generation

Jane Goodall and Christopher Lee (editors)TRAUMA AND PUBLIC MEMORY

Andrea HajekNEGOTIATING MEMORIES OF PROTEST IN WESTERN EUROPEThe Case of Italy

Inez HedgesWORLD CINEMA AND CULTURAL MEMORY

Sara JonesTHE MEDIA OF TESTOMONYRemembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic

Emily Keightley and Michael PickeringTHE MNEMONIC IMAGINATIONRemembering as Creative Practice

Amanda LagerkvistMEDIA AND MEMORY IN NEW SHANGHAIWestern Performances of Futures Past

Oren Meyers, Eyal Zandberg and Motti NeigerCOMMUNICATING AWEMedia, Memory and Holocaust Commemoration

Anne Marie MonchampAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY IN AN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANCOMMUNITYCulture, Place and Narrative

Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (editors)ON MEDIA MEMORYCollective Memory in a New Media Age

Katharina Niemeyer (editor)MEDIA AND NOSTALGIAYearning for the Past, Present and Future

Michael Pickering and Emily KeightleyPHOTOGRAPHY, MUSIC AND MEMORYPieces of the Past in Everyday Life

Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel (editors)CULTURAL MEMORIES OF NONVIOLENT STRUGGLEPowerful Times

Margarita SaonaMEMORY MATTERS IN TRANSITIONAL PERU

Anna Saunders and Debbie Pinfold (editors)REMEMBERING AND RETHINKING THE GDRMultiple Perspectives and Plural Authenticities

Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (editors)SPACE AND THE MEMORIES OF VIOLENCELandscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception

Marek Tamm (editor)AFTERLIFE OF EVENTSPerspectives of Mnemohistory

Bryoni TrezisePERFORMING FEELING IN CULTURES OF MEMORY

Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (editors)JOURNALISM AND MEMORY

Palgrave Macmillan Memory StudiesSeries Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–23851–0 (hardback)978–0–230–23852–7 (paperback)(outside North America only)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contactyour bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, thetitle of the series and the ISBN quoted above.

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG216XS, England

Photography, Music andMemoryPieces of the Past in Everyday Life

Michael PickeringLoughborough University, UK

Emily KeightleyLoughborough University, UK

© Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 2015Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-44120-1

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of thiswork in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2015 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companiesand has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978-1-349-56880-2 ISBN 978-1-137-44121-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137441218

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fullymanaged and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturingprocesses are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of thecountry of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataPickering, Michael.Photography, music, and memory : pieces of the past in everydaylife /Michael Pickering, Loughborough University, UK, Emily Keightley,Loughborough University, UK.

pages cm — (Palgrave Macmillan memory studies)Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Photography—Psychological aspects. 2. Music—Psychologicalaspects. 3. Collective memory. 4. Memorialization. I. Keightley,Emily, 1981– II. Title.TR183.P535 2015770—dc23 2015021444

ToKaren Pickering and Steve Armfield

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 Media and Memory 33

2 Resources for Remembering 61

3 Purpose and Meaning 106

4 Value and Significance 148

Pieces of the Past 180

Notes 188

Bibliography 199

Index 206

vii

Figures

2.1 Framed photographs on the mantelpiece and bookcase 932.2 Blackpool ‘Balloon’ car 1987 953.1 Jocelyn and her two sons at Outside Lands festival,

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco 1333.2 The Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Simeon

Nikolov Dimitrov, and his brother, Dimitar Dimitrov 1353.3 Three generations of children at Coughton Court,

Warwickshire 1434.1 Pradip’s mother and younger brother, Delhi, the early

1990s 171

viii

Acknowledgements

The research on which this book is based was funded by the LeverhulmeTrust (F/00 261/AC). We would like to thank the trust once again forenabling us to conduct the research and, for two years, employ NicolaAllett as a research assistant. We would also like to thank Nicola for allher help with the project. With this funding and assistance, we wereable to gather the information we needed in a variety of ways, butmost of all through the many interviews we conducted with our vol-unteer informants. The book would not have been possible withoutyou, so thank you to each and every one of you. Your contributionsare much prized. For assisting us in our initial recruitment campaign,we are grateful to various community associations and networks, andin particular we would like to extend our thanks to Human Rightsand Equalities Charnwood, Loughborough Archaeological and Histor-ical Society, Charnwood U3A, Nottingham Pakistan Centre, LeicesterAfrican Caribbean Centre, NORCAP, Nottingham Asian Arts Council,MUBU Miners Community Project, Shree Ram Krishna CommunityProject, Fearon Hall, Charnwood Arts and John Storer House. We alsodrew on pockets of interviewees elsewhere by snowballing from ourown community contacts (e.g. Cornwall U3A, Rugby Benn Partnership)and recruited participants from an international youth network intro-duced by Human Rights and Equalities Charnwood. We were able toadd fruitfully to our data through a Mass Observation call, funded byLoughborough University, and we would like to extend our gratitude toall those who responded to our questions. Throughout the three yearsof the project, we were offered excellent support and guidance by oursteering group, and for being members of this, we would like to offerour heartfelt thanks to Professors Steve Brown, Ann Gray and Liesbetvan Zoonen. We would also like to thank our wonderful colleagues inthe Communication and Media Studies section of the Department ofSocial Sciences at Loughborough University for their interest and sup-port during the time we spent gathering and analysing data on mediaand remembering: as well as Liesbet, these include David Buckingham,David Deacon, John Downey, Graham Murdock, Sabina Mihelj, JamesStanyer and Dominic Wring. David Chaney has been tremendouslyencouraging as we developed and conducted our research, and we wouldlike to emphasise how much this is appreciated. In the final stages of

ix

x Acknowledgements

completing the book, Steph Lawler and Matt Allen were both helpful.Also at this stage, John Sutton read the whole of our manuscript, engag-ing constructively with our main lines of analysis and argument, andattending meticulously to both explicit detail and possible lacunae. Thisplaces us considerably in his debt, especially as he sent us his commentsand suggestions at a time of great family distress. Finally and above all,we would like to express our enduring gratitude to Karen Pickering andSteve Armfield, our respective partners, not only for their help and sup-port but also for their enlivening presence in our lives. As a small tokenof our appreciation, we dedicate the book to them.

Introduction

Technologies of memory

In this book, we deal with two very different communicationstechnologies. Our interest in them derives from this difference, but isalso directed towards something they have in common – which is theirrelationship to memory. The relationship varies because of the con-trast between them, and that is what we want to explore. Photographyand recorded music have been chosen for concerted attention becauseour empirical research has shown that they are the two most signifi-cant technologies of remembering in everyday life, and have been fora considerable period of time. This research has involved us in severalinterrelated projects.1 Across this work photography and music werethe two media most referred to as mnemonic resources or devices. As aresult, the overall purpose of this book is to examine how they oper-ate as ways of facilitating processes of recall and recollection, looking atthem both in their own right and in their interrelationship. We look atthem in these ways because, although they are for the most part usedindependently of each other, they are often compared in what peoplesay of them. They are regarded as complementary means for regainingthe past and for relating the past to the present, however partially andselectively this may be done.

It has long been recognised that photography and remembering areclosely connected, but bearing in mind what a fecund resource it is,how photography features in remembering as an everyday social prac-tice has not received as much empirical investigation as it deserves. Thisis even more the case with recorded music, and with the complemen-tary practices, purposes and values of photographic and phonographicremembering. In focusing on photography and recorded music as

1

2 Photography, Music and Memory

conveyances of vernacular memory, we are dealing with what has oftenbeen neglected in both the history and aesthetics of photography, andthe critical analysis of popular music. The bearing that these two tech-nologies have on recall and recollection is also largely ignored in mediastudies and memory studies alike. Photography in its home-mode usesas a form of remembering and retaining connection to the past hasreceived more attention than recorded music as a facilitator of memory,but both are marginal concerns.

In studies of music, important work has been done on its consump-tion and the place it has in people’s lives, as for example in creatingor connecting with emotions, enhancing mood or forming the basis ofvarious embodied experiences, including popular dance. A good dealof attention has been paid to gender and sexual politics, to social move-ments and political campaigns, and to youth and fandom, where amongother things an ardent identification with various aspects of the musicprovides a symbolic source and marker of identity. Much less attentionhas been paid to the value of music for older generations or to cross-generational uses of music, and while the social analysis of popularmusic has increasingly turned to the ways in which it contributes tothe texture and rhythm of everyday life, this has been a fairly recentdevelopment, with the relations of music and memory remaining verymuch neglected.2 Popular music studies has devoted itself in the main tomatters relating to industry, technology, genre, performance and ques-tions arising primarily out of recording and recorded content. Theseare all important, but their study far outweighs research into suchsocial phenomena as the contextualised narrative meanings made outof music by people in local settings or the biographical significancederived from music across the ongoing course of their lives. It is thevoice of the scholar, critic or aficionado which generally prevails inthe assignment of musical value. When we turn to the relations ofvernacular photography and memory, it is again only fairly recentlythat they have begun to receive any serious attention. For most ofthe period following the Second World War, the predominant criticaltone towards vernacular photography was one of disparagement andderision. From the vantage point of art photography and photographytheory, vernacular forms were regarded as banal, hackneyed and trivial.The high-handed error in this involved the evaluation of such photog-raphy through inappropriate aesthetic criteria, either glibly dismissingit or making gross generalisations about its myriad contexts of use. Ver-nacular photography has also merited little, or at best fleeting, attentionfrom sociologists and historians unless of use for some other purpose,

Introduction 3

such as the illustrative embellishment of a topic seen as more serious.It has rarely been considered in its own right.

The only exception to this dismissal and neglect has been the femi-nist critique of family photography. In such photography, the balanceshifted over the course of the twentieth century from studio photog-raphy to privately taken photos in which formally posed portraits havedecreased and snapshots with an emphasis on immediacy and spontane-ity have increased. It has been an uneven and haphazard shift, but thealterations of expressive and aesthetic values indexed by it relate morebroadly to changed roles and relations in the family, and to changedviews on what should be involved in cross-temporal transmission frompast to present and present to future. Domestic photography becameassociated with specific situations or occasions, especially in the waycameras and film were advertised and marketed. Accordingly, snapshotsof holidays and young families, and particularly children, were chosenas the predominant photographic topic of people in their leisure time,coming together and uniting in unblemished harmony. This tendedto validate certain kinds of moment while diminishing others in sub-sequent remembering, and the feminist critique has highlighted theselective idealism of such photography (entailing, among other things,the absence of work, including domestic labour) as well as its reinforce-ment of conventional gender roles and relations.3 Often in alignmentwith left-wing activist groups, such critique was of considerable value,leading to significant work during the last three decades of the twenti-eth century, but its undoubted strengths were also its latent weaknesses.This was not so much that its often illuminating autobiographical focusencouraged an overuse of personal artefacts and at times revealed anoverriding concern with projects of personal redemption, but rather thatthe critique seemed at times to assume that this was all that need be said,and that there would be little point in conducting detailed investigationinto what people across various communities and social groups them-selves felt about the value of their own photography. Such investigationwas thereby discouraged, and in consequence little sustained empiricalinquiry has been conducted into how everyday photography is done orwhat it means to its practitioners.

Interestingly, this is not true of the historical analysis of nineteenth-century amateur female photography, which is certainly informed byfeminist values. This has produced evidence that is quite contrary toat least some of the feminist critique of late-twentieth century familyphotography. Among other things, it has shown that ‘far from naivelyreproducing dominant ideologies of domestic femininity, family albums

4 Photography, Music and Memory

often negotiate such ideologies with remarkable skill’.4 It has also madeclear that vernacular photography is far from monolithic, an impressionwhich sweeping assertion, without the support of sufficient empiricaldata, readily encourages. The development of a more expansive andsympathetic approach to such photography has been gradual, but thereare now clear signs of it, as for example in Gillian Rose’s work andher general argument that family photography, among other vernac-ular uses of the medium, is ‘a more ambivalent and complex field ofcultural practice than it has often been given credit for, even by fem-inists concerned with women’s domestic lives’.5 Rose adds to this thatwhile family snaps are conventionalised, when we move from attendingto them simply as images and think of them more in terms of what isdone with them, the ambivalences and intricacies of association deriv-ing from them become far more apparent. In attending to the practicesof remembering with which photography and recorded music are affil-iated, we very much concur with this, for we have found that the waysin which these two media are assimilated into everyday life can be densein meaning, rich in emotion and complex in mnemonic significance.

Another exemplary figure in this slow move towards taking vernac-ular photography seriously is Geoffrey Batchen, not least because hecelebrates the ways in which its idiosyncratic morphologies ‘refuse tocomply with the coherent progression of styles and technical innova-tions demanded by photography’s art history’, ‘muck up the familiarstory of great masters and transcendent aesthetic achievements’ and‘disrupt its smooth Euro-American prejudice’.6 With certain adjustmentsbeing made, similar points could be set forth about popular musicstudies, despite its occasional overlap with ethnomusicology.7 In hisprospectus for studying vernacular photographies, Batchen makes clearthe need to operate with an anti-canonical historical typology of ama-teur practices and uses. He highlights, in his own work, the tactiledimension of such practices and uses, even while acknowledging thatit is the combination of the haptic and visual which ‘makes photogra-phy so compelling a medium’.8 He does so because it is through thisdimension that vernacular photographs can tantalise ‘precisely by prof-fering the rhetoric of a transparency of truth and then problematizing it,in effect inscribing the writerly and the readerly in the same perceptualexperience’.9 Batchen offers a fascinating examination of this dimensionin his book-length study of photography and remembrance, but becauseof the direction our fieldwork experience has pointed us towards, in ourown study we place greater emphasis on the visual meanings and valuesof amateur photographs.

Introduction 5

Whereas Batchen is engaged in historical analysis of photographicimages and their framings, with their subjects and users having longsince passed on, our work has been for the most part with livinginformants who have discussed with us the relationship for them ofphoto-images and remembering.10 In such discussion, the visual haspredominated. We fully acknowledge the ample tactility of amateurphotographic use, but for our informants the visual dimension of pho-tographs, whether in albums, shoeboxes or on display, is valued morefor practices of remembering, even though they may touch an imagein the process of talking about it or, when we move to their pictureson open display, lovingly hold a picture frame taken from a mantel-piece. So while we see the tactile and visual components of vernacularphotography as continuous with each other, with the one informingand supporting the other, in everyday mnemonic usages, rather than inlonger-term commemorative practices, we have found the iconic indexi-cal quality of photographs to weigh most significantly with our researchparticipants. Although it is the case that ‘image and referent are lam-inated together’ in a photograph, as in a ‘landscape and the windowpane’ through which it is viewed, the majority of those we interviewedhave concentrated in their discourse on the landscape rather than thewindow.11 We have tried to honour that relative emphasis throughoutthe book. Such emphasis does not necessarily mean – though of courseit can – that viewers of photos are not aware that the image depicted ina photo is different to how they see the world with their own two eyes.It simply indicates that the image is often held to be more important asa mnemonic resource than its material qualities, and that as an image itdoes have a clear ‘evidential force’.12

The major exception to this visual emphasis, as we shall see in thefirst chapter, occurs when people reflect on the loss threatened by dig-ital photographs of the material qualities valued in experiencing theiranalogue predecessors, but apart from that it is photography’s potentindexicality which has also been compared and contrasted most ofall with the mnemonic powers of recorded and/or transmitted music.Indeed, our analytical emphasis on the visual dimension has been con-solidated by the more-or-less complete absence for our informants ofa tactile dimension in hearing and listening to recorded music, eventhough again we have occasionally noticed the affection with whichone or two people have held certain LP sleeves as they have discussed thevinyl albums they contain. So we differ quite significantly from Batchen,and in this his overriding point remains true, for if we are to operatewith a wide-ranging typology of photographic practices and uses, we

6 Photography, Music and Memory

need to adopt a variety of approaches and different key points of focus.The choices we make between them will depend on our explanatorypurposes.

This book builds on the work of scholars like Batchen and Rose, butalso extends it by discussing photography alongside recorded music andconsidering both as vehicles or catalysts of memory. Doing so is in partdesigned to offset the neglect and disdain with which vernacular pho-tography has been met by setting it critically on a par with studies offandom and the serious attention that has been paid to passionate orenthusiastic engagement with music. In addition to this, focusing onthe practical take-up of two everyday media simultaneously is rarelydone in media studies or in the specialist studies of particular media,at least where detailed empirical work is concerned. We find this ratherodd because, in everyday life, various media become interwoven in theways they are used, informing and complementing each other preciselybecause their communicative modes vary and provide different experi-ences. This is certainly the case with acts and processes of remembering.It would then seem peculiar to study only visual media or only audiomedia. They are both part of the texture of our day-to-day lives; they areboth part of the same mnemonic environment; and both are drawn onfor the ways they contribute to maintaining connections between pastand present and developing an understanding of how those connectionsmake possible an ongoing narrative. Of course they do not make thesecontributions in an incessant side-by-side relation, for at times photog-raphy is a preferred mode of remembering and at others recorded musicis the medium that prevails, but in everyday life they do not operatewithin rigidly compartmentalised spheres – they are used interchange-ably and also converge in helping to keep the past in fertile interactionwith the present. Comparative studies of media in their various andchanging uses facilitate a more refined sociological understanding oftheir role in everyday life.

We could certainly point to the greater neglect of the relationsbetween recorded music and remembering and claim that this wouldjustify exclusive attention being given to music and memory, but thatwould ignore the weight placed upon both media technologies whenpeople talk about their everyday practices of remembering. While weneed to give full recognition to their various differences in how peo-ple regularly use them to mark past events and periods in their lives, weneed also to attend to how they cross-refer and, at times, illuminate eachother, both analytically and in reflective relational evaluations of every-day media as mnemonic vehicles. This book does both, and in the end

Introduction 7

insists most of all on the significance of these visual and sonic technolo-gies for the complementary, even interlocking manner in which theyserve vernacular interpretations and understandings of the past. In thisrespect, their overlooked mutualities may be just as significant as howthey operate on their own.

Attending to these two cultural technologies, in particular, is intendedto make at least some small adjustment for the fact that they have bothbeen ignored, side-lined or played down in the history of communi-cations. Photography and phonography are either absent, assigned thestatus of bit players in contrast to the commanding stage presence ofthe press, telegraphy, cinematography, radio and television, or regardedas belonging primarily to the domains of art history, musicology andmusic history. These two media do not merit being downgraded orshunted aside in this way, for they have made significant contribu-tions to modern experience and more specifically to the ways in whichwe remember in modern and late modern life. At the same time thebook is intended to contribute to the growing literature on the integra-tion of media technologies in everyday life, looking not at how specificmedia like television are received but at how these technologies areused and assimilated alongside others – how in our case self-made pho-tographs are woven into ongoing narratives and how self-chosen musicbecomes integral to our identities, attaining value and significance forremembering as it is held up against the passing of time.

A further reason for deciding to focus on these two particular media isthat we wish to contest a frequently made assertion that ‘social media’have inaugurated a new participatory communicative environment.This is historically abbreviated. ‘Social media’ has arisen as a term indirect alignment with digital technologies, but the forms of interactionand sociality with which they are associated extend much further back,even though the ways in which they are used are obviously in someways specific to these technologies. Photography and recorded musichave been widely used as social media for well over a century, and arepart of a longer pattern of everyday media use that has been extended,not brought into being, by such devices as the mobile camera phone andthe iPod. By attending to the ways in which our two everyday media areused in making sense of social experience over the course of time, weintend to recover an understanding of traditional media as participa-tory and creative in relation to the communication of experience andthe temporal uses of experience. Potentially at least, this retrospectivelysituates new social media in a longer durational sequence and histor-ically contextualises such media and their uses in everyday life.13 Our

8 Photography, Music and Memory

own analytical focus in relation to that sequence and context is on howthey operate mnemonically, rather than across the broader spectrum oftheir everyday usage, and that in itself is important, for much is saidabout mediated memory in the abstract, with little attention being paidto what this involves empirically on the ground, and what the techno-logical mediation of remembering may entail. It is to this issue, and themundane settings in which it applies, that we now turn.

Vernacular memory

Both photography and recorded music act not only as conduits of mem-ory but also as ways of configuring it, as a particular image comes tostand as the memory we have of an event or place, perhaps acquiringgreater significance than the moment it captures, or a certain song car-ries such resonant associations with a friend we have lost touch with oran unsettling episode in the past that they eclipse other occasions onwhich we have listened to it. As pieces of the past, they can summonforth strong evocations or set off powerful reverberations. We refer tophotography and items of recorded music together as pieces of the pastthroughout the book. The term may at first seem to betoken artefactsthat exist as static fragments, isolated from each other in and over time,but in the way we use it, it has a quite contrary sense. When a photo-graph is taken out of the setting in which it has acquired its intimatemeaning, as for example in a family album, or when a popular song isnoted simply by its bare title in a music catalogue, they can of courseseem temporally stranded, irrelative and without connection. They arenot like that in everyday remembering and, for that reason, we shallattempt to convey how, in such remembering, they are woven togetheras part of an extended and evolving narrative, and so interconnectedacross time, even as their meaning or value may be modified or other-wise altered. But we do need to keep in view the differences betweenthem as pieces of the past, along with the differences between them andour own memories and processes of remembering.

Memory is malleable, though not infinitely so. We strive to retainsome claim on its accuracy, or at least lack of distortion, and maintainbelief in its relative fidelity to previous experience. In contrast, photog-raphy and recorded music in their exact fixity of representation seemto offer an unequivocal alibi for what we remember being directly con-gruent with the past. It is that sense of an alibi which then providesthe basis for investing what we remember with its narrative meaningand value. This can feel intensely personal, its significance seeming to

Introduction 9

be lodged entirely in our developing sense of self-identity over the pas-sage of time, but just as importantly photography and recorded musicbecome charged with meaning and gain their cross-temporal signifi-cance through the ways in which they are shared among, for example,lovers or spouses, growing children or boon companions. Much of howthey operate as vehicles or catalysts of memory occurs in the interstitialspaces between personal and popular memory. It is within these spacesthat we can locate vernacular memory.

In attending to the value of photography and recorded music forremembering in everyday life, we are building on our conception ofthe cross-mediations of personal and popular memory which we devel-oped at length in our previous book, The Mnemonic Imagination.14 Whilewe maintain and extend that conception, our concern in this book iswith how particular resources are adopted and used in everyday life asways of connecting past and present, ensuring certain lines of continu-ity over time and registering inevitable changes across different stagesin personal life and interpersonal relationships. These resources, in ourcase photography and recorded music, are deployed in planned andunplanned ways as both forms and facilitators of remembering within abroad patchwork of cultural artefacts and practices. They are, for manypeople, integral to the effort to sustain particular trajectories of livingand create across time a relatively coherent sense of identity. Central tothis effort, in the familiar milieus of everyday life, is the process of local-isation. It is this which runs through the heterogeneous assemblage ofimages and sounds that are part and parcel of everyday remembering.Our preferred term for this is vernacular memory, and we set out ourconceptualisation of it at the outset not only in order to identify its maincharacteristics and consequences, but also because it is this modality ofremembering that is the focus of the book as a whole.

Numerous studies have looked at commemorative vernacular activi-ties and at the tensions or contestations between official and vernacularmemory discourses. These involve responses to national events such asthe Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, or tragic occurrences affecting arelatively small social circle, as for instance with fatal traffic accidents.15

Far fewer studies have attended to vernacular memory in their morecontinuous, extended and mundane forms. In our own effort to movein this direction, we conceive of the process of localisation as a wayof ‘making our own’ in the contexts of our everyday lives. Makingour own past–present connections in this way means taking whatevermaterials are at hand and using them to forge and maintain a senseof cross-temporal transaction, as our lives change and years pass, and

10 Photography, Music and Memory

distance increases between an event in the past and our contemporaryperspective upon it. As our two technologies of remembering make clear,these materials can be self-produced and already situated in local set-tings, or derived from mass-mediated cultural products that are thenmade over in the realisation of their personal and interpersonal signif-icance. Even though produced and distributed on a global industrialscale, music informs and at times becomes integral to personal expe-rience and interpersonal relations, often of the most intimate kind.It may also become part of the fabric of vernacular memory throughthe ways in which it speaks of, or to, collective experiences of varioussorts. In any case, as Michel de Certeau put it, the ‘consumer cannotbe identified or qualified by the newspapers or commercial products heassimilates: between the person (who uses them) and these products(indexes of the ‘order’ which is imposed on him), there is a gap of vary-ing proportions opened by the use that he makes of them’.16 It is inthis gap that the relations of memory and recorded music are formed,so that regardless of the different points of origination and circuits ofdistribution in which popular music and photography are involved, theprocess of making our own occurs in, or is reoriented to, the knownand habitual settings and contexts of everyday life.17 It is these settingsand contexts which configure the social and symbolic spaces ‘in whichcultural forms are actively deployed, the set of relations and interdepen-dencies through which people define themselves and each other, actand interact, in terms of the cultural resources available to them’.18 Thecultural resources of images and sounds which for particular individualsand groups become both deliberately and contingently associated withthe past are brought together through the ongoing process of makingthem aesthetically proximate, so constituting them as the artefacts thathave the most intimate meaning and strongest mnemonic resonance.

Vernacular memory is a collective form of memory but far from theabstracted or mythical level of the nation, where collective memoryis hegemonically constructed through official commemoration, stateritual and invented tradition. It also exceeds private memories whosesignificance is primarily or even exclusively for a single person, at leastto the extent that it has come to appear as such to that person. Ver-nacular memory exists in the intermediate social and symbolic spaceswithin particular groups and between the individuals who comprisethem.19 It involves individuals’ memories but in the local sites andspaces where they are shared, such as a domestic mantelpiece or thepub down the road, and it also involves national events but in the localsites and spaces where these are assimilated and related to lives close

Introduction 11

at hand, personally known and shared. So, for example, in vernacu-lar memory-making, those who produce and draw on such mnemonicresources as photographs share in some kind of proximity – spatial,social, cultural or affective – unlike the production and consumptionof newspapers or television programmes. The roles of producer and userin domestic photography are socially intertwined and always potentiallyinterchangeable even when they take on gendered associations. This isonly rarely the case with recorded music. Such music is nevertheless anintegral component of vernacular remembering because its meaningsare the result of a dynamic interchange between producers and listen-ers. Meaning-making and the assignment of value does not reside solelywithin the musical text; they are also realised in its reception and inter-pretation, and it is the cross-temporal consequence of this which is thenactive when hearing a song or piece of music generates a profound emo-tional response as it reconnects us with a particular past scene, personor pivotal moment in our lives.

Characterising vernacular memory in this way requires immediatequalification because the mnemonic resources on which we are focus-ing may be shared and talked about across huge physical distances, asfor example when photographs are sent as email attachments or postedon websites like Flickr or Photobucket. Of course, even when nothing isdigitally sent or posted, we may describe in a letter to a distant friend orrelative the past associations which a sonata by Robert Schumann or apop ballad by Céline Dion may have for us. But our point is that vernac-ular memory does not only occur in familiar offline sites. For example,Aaron Hess has explored how, after the tragic events of 11 September2001, web memorials have provided a site and medium for communica-tive expression of the vernacular voice. He shows that memorialising onthe internet is a significant form of communal vernacular discourse con-tributing to the formation and transmission of popular memory. Hessalso contends that web memorial discourse provides an opportunity forus to engage more closely and extensively with vernacular responses tohistorical events and circumstances.20

Examples such as this are legion, and what they show is that remem-bering in place and across space mutually interact in various differentways on various different scales, and that technologically mediatedforms of communication contribute to and exert influence over pro-cesses of remembering. We should see these processes as a continuumbetween physical locations where we engage in face-to-face interper-sonal acts of remembering with those who are co-present with us,and the social environments created by communications media which

12 Photography, Music and Memory

permit access to and parallel acts of remembering with those who arephysically absent from us, as for example in a telephone conversation,with at least some attenuation from these two-way modes of communi-cation in the realm of parasocial interaction where there may be a feltsense of intimacy at a distance but also a concomitant loss of reciprocity.

It should therefore be clear that localisation takes various forms and iscertainly not to be regarded as synonymous with geographical proximityeven though it can of course involve the intimate attachment involvedin a sense of place. The sense of a known social world being confinedto one’s immediate locality has become steadily eroded as societies havebecome modern. It endured for a long time, so that even in the mid-twentieth century it was noted of a Yorkshire pit village that ‘the worldoutside Dinlock to Barnsley is too distant to consider, and after Barnsleysimply doesn’t exist’.21 Reference to the ‘outside world’ is now increas-ingly rare, with distinctions between here and the world outside havingbeen hugely altered by modern communications, extending from earlycinema to the internet and online encounters and exchanges. Indeed,such reference now seems terminally parochial, and vernacular localisa-tion is extensively different in orientation since it can operate in virtualas well as geographical locations, is not confined to any one locationand continues as a process when, from childhood onwards, we movefrom place to place, settling in different parts of a country or migratingto another country. This doesn’t mean that the increased deterritoriali-sation of social life as a consequence of a globalising world has renderedterritoriality and territorial logics completely unimportant. It is ratherthat the proliferation of wider and wider connections occurs in inter-action with the persistence of sense of place, with localisation beingcentral to that interaction. In this way, the process of localisation asso-ciated with vernacular remembering tends to be geared towards formsof association that are different to the myriad anonymous interactionsin the teeming metropolitan city, and forms of affiliation different tothe putative bondings of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. Thisis because it is evinced and experienced primarily in terms of group-belongings, whether these are family or friends, or broader networksand coteries of shared interests.

Vernacular remembering is thus always a matter of the scale of ref-erence and relation which memory has for those involved. This is assignificant as the specific content of shared recollections or the socialframeworks in which they occur, and it is because of this that it canincorporate both first- and second-hand experience.22 With the lat-ter, which derives from events or processes outside of people’s direct