Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance

Abstract

The success of Photobooth demonstrates, the power of historical photographs to speak across time and place and create an emotional connection with contemporary readers. Me directly explores this relationship between photography and memory, and shows how ordinary people have sought to strengthen the emotional appeal of photographs, primarily by embellishing them - with text, paint, frames, embroidery, fabric, string, hair, flowers, bullets, cigar wrappers, butterfly, wings, etc. - to create strange and often beautiful hybrid objects, small works of art in their own right. The book feature color photographs of 80 such objects, made from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These beautiful objects bear witness to the age-old struggle to spare photography's subjects from oblivion. Thinking outside the box, Batchen once again combines an innovative curatorial practice with a provocative brand of art-historical writing. -ArtForum, Best of 2004. Me beautifully recalls time travelers intent on touching a void that is not only our own past, but also their future. - Modern Painters. In addition to the sheer mystery and beauty of the images it presents, Forget Me Not offers an alternative way to look at the history of photography, a history dominated by the conventions of art history which effectively excludes most photographs - candid views, family snapshots, and the like - taken of since the invention of the camera. The book adopts a different tone - a personal and speculative voice that speaks to the objects rather than about them, and to the readers and not at them, while offering a visual treasure chest of appealing images.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.