Working with Photos in Biographical Research

Working with photographs in biographical research opens up a new dimension of bodily references that show specific connections between the past and the present. The indexical traces of an earlier photographic situation, materialized in a photograph, connect us emotionally and bodily in the moment of viewing to a past that may not be part of a narratively formulated memory, whether we have "forgotten" it or cannot remember it in the way it is depicted, or whether we did not experience it ourselves. Thus, when we look at photographs, we enter into a complex relationship with a fixed image in which different biographical processes and perspectives manifest and intersect. In other words, when we look at photographs, we are dealing with multiple temporal perspectives (Fischer 1978), which may be brought together in the imagination, but which may resist a coherent story more than the emergence of memories in narrative processes.
In my paper, I will focus on the theoretical and methodological challenge of dealing with the different perspectives of past and present that intersect when looking at a photograph.