Picturing families, making family memories

This paper employs a range of visual materials to explore memory, family, and biography. The materials include a snapshot and studio portrait, an antique gold pocket watch, and a scrapbook culled from the mountain of stuff collected by our parents’ families over the past century. In a written dialogue, which is a modification of photo-elicitation, we reflect on each of the objects separately and then together. We use this format – of a written dialogue about each of the objects – to make sense of our family in the past and to consider how objects make family memories. Our process is iterative. First one of us writes a description of and response to an object, and then the other responds to the object and the other’s written text. We follow each of the written dialogues by working together. Through our dialogue with objects, first in writing and then face-to-face, we tap into and recover individual memories, new understandings, and ways our personal experiences reflect cultural, historical, and institutional currents in the twentieth century U.S. Our methodology in this project is similar to one employed by scholars interested in a grounded approach to cultural memory. We conclude by reflecting on the place of visual materials in the social construction of family biographies and histories.