Description
The study of photography has received relatively little attention in Romanian Studies. Pushed to the margins and silenced in Romanian academic discourse, photography is a mnemonic tool and important depository of the collective memory. Photographs not only reveal stories and depict everyday lives, but they also generate questions and provide knowledge about the social world they depict, positioning photographs as the starting point for inquiry rather than its end.The focus of this paper is on family photographs. Due to their vernacular nature, this extensive photographic practice is often considered banal and ordinary, simply carried out as part of the fabric of everyday life. Family photographs, however, are more than personal memories of birthdays, friendships and special family events with a certain mobility attached to them, given they travel between family members and are exposed to the ‘familial gaze’ (Hirsch 1999). Drawing on the photographic family archive of three generations of amateur photographers from a family in Romania, covering the interwar, communist and post-communist transition period of the 1990s, this paper argues that family photographs are visual narratives that document societal, cultural and political issues in a global context but from a personal perspective. In doing so, photographs disrupt grand narratives of global relations by focusing on the specific, the quotidian and the eccentric, whilst creating ideas of belonging, collective memory and social relations. Considering the family archive as a site of knowledge production and photography as a catalyst for memory and storytelling, where social power is negotiated, contested and confirmed, this paper further investigates the practices, silences and ideologies of this particular family archive and how it constructed a narrative of the country’s historical past, thereby functioning as the foundation of historical understanding.
| Period | 29 May 2025 → 31 May 2025 |
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