Making Memory Visible Through Photography

Making Memory Visible Through Photography

Dr Julia Winckler 

7th May 2026

Introduction 

I would like to thank Gresham College for the invitation and thank every one of you for coming to Barnard Hall, or for joining us online. 

In my presentation, I will talk about the transformative power of photography, which I've experienced first-hand through archival inspired projects, through teaching photographic projects in higher education, through running photography workshops and through curated exhibitions where archival photographs were returned to the places where they had originally been made, which has led to powerful engagement with local communities. 

Roadmap

1. Origins of My Practice
2. Introducing the personal trigger for the work: family photographs, loss, and recovery as a starting point for archival and photographic thinking.
3. Activating Personal Photographic Archives
4. How dormant photographs become active materials through selection, narration, reuse, sharing.
5. From Personal to Cultural Memory
6. Moving between personal memory, communicative memory (shared, intergenerational), cultural memory (archival, institutional, symbolic). Positioning photography as a bridge between these forms.
7. Living Archives and Participant Led Projects
8. Exploring alternatives to fixed archives: living archives and the creation of new work.
9. Focusing on collaborative, participant led practices.
10. Professional and Institutional Archives
11. Engaging with archival holdings and photographers’ archives.
12. Archives for the Future
13. Opening-up archives for new audiences and drawing on the photographs’ responsive potential.
14. Photography as an evolving memory practice rather than a closed record.

Jo Spence / Putting Myself in the Picture & Family Snaps

I lived in Toronto during the 1990s, and while studying for a master’s in social work there, I was introduced to the ground-breaking work of British photographer Jo Spence, whose first book, Putting Myself in the Picture, made a profound impact on me. Spence believed that the personal is political, and she urged others to ‘use our cameras, tape recorders, diaries’ to witness our own histories, to learn to protest and share, and to learn to nurture ourselves’ and to make work that is self-determined. 

Unpacking the Tucked Away Suitcase

As part of my degree, I had the opportunity to do a six-month placement, working with a group of migrant women enrolled on an employment bridging programme. I had prepared a session focused on future goals and aspirations and suggested that we use photography and collage to explore visualizing these. This prompted one of the participants in the group to explain that when she moved to Canada many years previously, she had to completely reinvent herself, and that it felt to her that not only were all of her family photographs still tucked away in a suitcase under her bed, but the person she had been before, had to be tucked away, too.  This powerful comment made us all consider how one could begin to recover and reclaim a more multidimensional identity, that would join up experiences and make space for a more holistic sense of self. Drawing on the technique of photo elicitation, where personal photographs can be used as a prompt to share stories, I suggested an activity where participants could choose 5-10 images each, from their family albums, to reflect on their life journeys. This was a very powerful and cathartic process, as the women shared stories of their lives, prior to and since living in Canada, in the process connecting different times of their lives. The images acted as a ‘holding place’ for stories to unfold, reframing experiences from an individual perspective and sharing these in a group setting. In response, one of the participants, Josefina, wrote this beautiful poem:

It is time that we discover what we bring with us inside (ourselves) our suitcases: Because time passes with us not knowing the value of the treasures that can be found within them.

She changed ‘inside our suitcases’ to ‘inside ourselves’, reflecting on the increased confidence and deep insights that this more self-determined process had on her.  The process made everyone realize that they had already achieved so much in their lives and had shown so much courage and this also helped to identify future goals with more clarity. 

While subsequently working in frontline social work for three years, I continued using the techniques of photo elicitation, photo storytelling and photo voice, the sharing of a story, feelings or thoughts through making a small number of new photographs, that can be combined with text, noticing that this enabled participants to express themselves more freely.  At the same time, I also experimented using collaborative phototherapy with my friend and educator, Stephanie Conway.

This inspired me to study photography full-time to further explore the potential and I enrolled on a photography BA at the University of Brighton in 1998.

Activating Personal Photographic Archives

Activating an inherited personal archive: Traces 

Over the next three years, the course provided an opportunity to develop new techniques and have space to learn and experiment. I also worked with several local community organisations that had darkrooms and where photography was used as a tool to document experiences and share stories with participants. I remember the look of delight on a new group member’s face when they could see a photographic image slowly emerge in the developer tray, making visible the latent image of the moment they had photographed. 

During my studies, I lived in a bungalow in Peacehaven, which had belonged to my late great-aunt, Martha Hecker. I discovered an old leather suitcase in the attic. I learned that this suitcase had belonged to her husband, my great uncle, Hugo Hecker, who had escaped from Vienna to England in the summer of 1939.

A small number of personal objects were also inside the suitcase, and I had previously been given the only two surviving photographs of his family by my mother. I already knew that out of Hugo’s large, extended family, only two brothers and two young nieces survived the Holocaust. 

Hugo’s parents and four of his siblings and their families were all murdered. In his lifetime, Hugo, traumatized by the war, did not speak about his enormous loss. I began working on this project as an attempt to preserve the memory of the Hecker family through photography.  

I found an old dolls house, discarded by the roadside and brought it home. I decided to use it as a container to hold the broken and fragmented story of the family. 

I then made slides of each individual and re-photographed, person-by-person, projecting the slides into the doll’s house, so that each one had their own photographic space. The more I zoomed in on their individual faces and the larger these became, the more they turned into abstract shadows as facial contours dissolved. 

I carried out extensive research in various archives including at the Wiener Library and Imperial War Museum. I then travelled to Poland to take photographs on location searching for traces of the family. 

In Krakow, I visited the former Jewish Ghetto area and several archives. 

I also travelled to Strumien, the town where the Hecker family had lived and owned a clothing shop. I brought copies of the original photographs and approached passers-by to see if anyone had memories of the shop or the family. I encountered a young woman working in a small grocers who agreed to take the images to show her grandfather. She called me the next day to say that he could recall the family and which road they had lived in, saying only that he thought they “had to leave because of Hitler”.

I took a series of photos and visited Auschwitz Birkenau which is only 40 kilometres from Strumien, where I took photographs of the railway tracks leading up to the entrance to the camp.

On my return I projected these new images into the dolls house. This process developed into the project Traces, through which I sought to witness, search for and preserve the memory of the Hecker family and more broadly reflect on the inexpressible loss of life.

The photo historian Marianne Hirsch terms this form of memory work Post Memory. She writes that through an active engagement with archival photographs, documents and objects, we can connect with a past that predates our own. This form of memory, as opposed to communicative memory, cannot be mediated through personal recollection, as it relates to a time outside of our own living memory, but rather, ‘it requires forms of imaginative investment and creation’ (1997:7). 

The Traces photographs were subsequently exhibited in Germany, the UK, France and Poland, where it became the starting point for workshops and exchanges. One invaluable outcome was contact with Polish lawyer and sociologist, Wojtek Kielkowski, who was writing a thesis on the fate of Jewish communities’ form that region. He unearthed archival material from various State Archives, which provided a rich and detailed picture of the Hecker family’s involvement in the life of their community up until the 1930s which he generously shared with me. 

Between Communicative and Cultural Memory: Two Sisters

In contrast to the previous project which relied on post memory, for my next project I wanted to engage with communicative memory, which is shared and intergenerational. I worked with my maternal grandmother Vicki, Martha’s sister, juxtaposing their contrasting wartime experiences, through engagement with personal family photographs, albums, documents, letters, objects and cassette recordings. Handling these personal possessions created a strong emotional bond. 

These prompted visits to archives in Berlin, London and the Isle of Man, where additional material was discovered, including a photograph of my great-aunt used for her internment document that no one in the family had seen before. This examination of cultural memories contrasted with the personal accounts of my grandmother and the audio recordings made by my great aunt.

Here I sought to position photography as a bridge between these complimentary forms of memory, intercrossing histories and viewpoints. The sociologists Werner and Zimmermann write about this relational entanglement and their work combining past and present perspectives, overlapping histories and temporalities which they term Histoire Croisé/Regards Croisées. 

My maternal great aunt moved to England in 1933 from Germany, and within a few months of the outbreak of WWII she was interned as an enemy alien, initially in Holloway Prison in London and from July 1940, in Port Erin on the Isle of Man. During internment she embroidered her internment journey onto a white cotton handkerchief, which remains a crucial artifact foregrounding her internment experiences. I used the handkerchief to create a textured effect and background, onto which I projected mediated visual impressions of her journey which I recreated by sea and train and on location on the Isle of Man. By this method, I hoped to find ways of revealing some glimpses of her experience. 

Simultaneously I sought to mediate my grandmother’s personal memories of living in Berlin during that period. I went to Berlin having followed up on her wartime recollections. She could vividly remember the sounds and smell of burning but was vaguer about dates and details. 

The project concluded with an exhibition at the Manx National Heritage Museum, where I brought together the varied elements, bringing my grandmother into the space through a contemporary portrait, alongside poignant inherited objects belonging to Martha, including a framed photograph of her and Hugo taken shortly before Hugo’s passing.

The gallery space was filled with a soundscape derived from the voices of the two sisters. 

During gallery tours and talks, visitors had opportunities to share personal memories and several older residents told me that they had vivid memories of the time when nearly 30.000 internees had to stay on the island. 

Aleida Assmann distinguishes between three forms of memory: personal or individual memory, collective memory, and cultural memory. These do not exist in opposition to each other but work together in complex ways. Assmann explores the significance of these forms of memory in mediating, remembering as well as forgetting past experiences. She draws a useful distinction between episodic memory, “what has been experienced”, and semantic memory, which is based on “what we have read or learned”, and which draws from cultural memory.  

Living Archives and Participant-Led Projects

Stories from Agadez

My first degree was in Anthropology and African Studies. I was contacted by an old school friend, Thomas Knoll, who was working at the time for an NGO in Niger. He remembered that I had written an essay on the enlightened 19th C traveller and scholar Heinrich Barth, and he informed me that there was a museum dedicated to the memory of Barth in Agadez.  

I was able to obtain funding from the Arts Council and Thomas facilitated a research trip and series of workshops, in conjunction with Hed Tamat, a locally based NGO that works closely with community engagement.

Over several weeks, under the guidance of several community members, I was able to footstep Heinrich Barth ‘s journey as detailed in his extensive diaries, and I also spent time on the compound that is home to the Barth Museum. 

I was introduced to the Sultan of Agadez and made a series of images of Agadez and the surrounding landscape. 

I also coordinated a participant-led photography project that captures the stories and images made by four adults and four young people, who were inspired by our discussion of the innovative approach taken by Barth, whose fluency in Arabic and several African languages allowed him to directly record oral histories. These were enhanced with accomplished sketches and maps.

The participants were invited to record any aspects of their lives that were meaningful and that they would like to share with audiences in other places. Their focus was on family, work, including celebrating the important work that women undertake, on community, but also the importance of cultural heritage and the opportunities to record memories through photography. 

Mohammed Tambo: 

 I think history is important as it allows us to situate ourselves within the context in which we live. It helps us try and give meaning to what we will do tomorrow. 

Slide 36-37 Hadjara 

Sarhid Efes Hamadalher: 

I hope that these photos make you discover the beauty of this country and the fantastic potential it has. I like photography a lot because it allows us to relieve the past and it is also a great passion of life. 

These photographs are now part of a living, community archive, and represent an important impression of life in Agadez, recorded by a small number of residents at a specific moment in their lives. 

I was subsequently able to show these photographs at London’s Brunei gallery for the duration of three months, and the first thing gallery visitors would see was Mohammed’s comment on the importance of history in maintaining a cultural identity, and the portrait of the Sultan of Agadez above the quote. 

Gallery visitors were also able to engage with archival objects, and audio recordings I had collected with community elders, teachers and young people during my stay. 

Several hundred school children from various London boroughs came to see the exhibition, and together with artist and educator Anita Chowdry, we ran photography and writing workshops in the space. Young people had the opportunity to share their own stories, and to also write postcards to the eight Agadez-based community photographers, commenting on their photographs and stories. These cards were returned via diplomatic post. 

Research for the project also led me to the story of Abbega and Dorugu, who had accompanied Barth as guides on his expedition and travelled back to England and Germany from Timbuktu with him in the 1850s. Dorugu’s account of these journeys offer a fascinating parallel insight to Barth’s expedition. We know about Dorugu’s experiences as they were recorded in the Magana Hausa, published in 1885, and rediscovered by Paul Newman at Yale University in 1970, who notes that the book had not been borrowed since 1890. This rare eye-witness account was published by Newman and his colleague Kirk-Greene as the 1971 West African Travels and Adventures, where I found it. I am very pleased to say that Professors Paul and Roxana Newman are with us in the audience this evening. 

A particularly rewarding outcome of this project is that the charity Mate Ni Kane got in touch with me and subsequently published Dorugu’s account in Hausa through a Niger-based publisher, and this has now become a standard school textbook there. 

A Country I Always Carry with Me

Around the same time, I was also engaged on a collaborative project with the artist Nerea Martinez de Lecea, which explored themes of cultural displacement. This led to us working with Brighton-based interpreters, who provided interpretation services utilized by local agencies. Over a period of several months, and combining creative writing, poetry, collaborative portraiture and drawing, the participants produced a body of work reflecting on their own experiences of displacement. The Brighton Photo Biennial founded a publication, and the work was subsequently exhibited at the University of Brighton. The participants sought to create testimonials about the challenges of their work and the impact it had on their own experiences of migration. 

The title of the project came out of a responsive text written by Mustafa Mersinoglu, who observed that ‘however far away I seem to go from the places where I grew up, my mother tongue is a country I always carry with me’. 

Christine Graham, who translated from Kiswahili to English, reflected on the embodiment of communication to enhance the verbal comprehension. 

And Serge Clifford, who translated from French and Creole, considered the importance of music in defining his sense of identity, but at the time expressed his sadness and feelings of loss. 

Through Our Eyes

Between 2006 and 2018, I was engaged on the Through Our Eyes project as a curriculum developer and art education trainer by the Robert HN Ho Foundation in Hong Kong.

Each year there was a different theme, from exploring personal identity, to working with family archives, to exploring memory landscapes and unfolding stories. Through several sharing workshops, I was involved in the training of artist educators, who worked with young people in schools and community centres, and in after school clubs across the whole territory, using photography as a creative and reflective tool. Each year, there would be a number of exhibitions and publications, highlighting some of the work made by participants. 

I just want to share a couple of project examples here, which include working with objects, drawings, writing, overlay and self-portraiture. 

As part of a session on working with personal objects, Kwok had brought in a teapot and two archival photographs of her parents when they were young and which date to a time before she was born. Her accompanying text is written from the perspective of the tea pot:  

READ EXTRACT 

I am a traditional Chinese teapot. A beautiful teapot. Five years ago, I was sold to a family of five. Since then, I have enjoyed an ordinary yet happy life. Although the children, two boys and one girl, do not pay much attention to me, Father and Mother love me very much. After each meal, they share the aroma of tea with me. As time goes by and my body stains, I hope they will not forget our life together, now and forever. 

For this diptych, Angelique made two very different self-portraits. In one she held up a framed print of dried flowers, which she had gifted her mother, writing that she chose to hold this frame in the picture as she had liked to observe how her mother had reacted to the gift, which she felt also symbolized her life. 

But there is more than meets the eye, these framed flowers can appeal as happy or sad memories. 

For the other image, she worked with projection and overlay, using one of Mustafa Mezinoglu’s photographs, from A Country I always Carry with me, which I had shared with the group. Here she is positioning herself in front of Mustafa’s projected image, writing that 

most of us have lost control of our lives, we need to cut these strings of control and start driving our own lives. We need to get out of the shadows and be heard. Don’t be a shadow puppet’

How to visually represent a sense of self and affirm one’s identity were strong themes throughout the duration of the Through Our Eyes Project. Here, Wah experimented with portraiture and drawing, reflecting that the process of making this work has given her a much better self-understanding and that she will continue to be the way she is. 

Each year, photographs were shown in different places, from pop up exhibitions to gallery or school settings. One year, the photographs were projected into shop windows and doorways in an old, traditional, part of the city, with many of the shops having already been shut down prior to demolition. 

Experimental Archaeology: Within and Beyond the Photographic Archive

I had been working at the University of Brighton since 2003, and over time, developed a whole range of modules on working with participatory and community led photography. One of the modules I designed was the Experimental Archaeology: Within and Beyond the Photographic Archive module. As part of the module, students were encouraged to engage with a wide range of archival material (family or found photographs, objects, documents etc) as a starting point for new 

photographic projects. I would discuss the various ways archives can accumulate – distinguishing between the accidental / deliberate, the private/professional. 

We also visited several institutional archives, including Hulton Getty Picture Archives in London, so that the students could see how archival photographs are collected and preserved. This would also lead onto discussions around what constitutes an archive or how a collection is defined, archival collecting processes of exclusion, omission, discarding, accumulation and how even in a secure archive, there is no guarantee of perpetual preservation of photographs. 

I shared with them my own archival finds of albums and photographs rescued from local authority tips, skips or on trawls through flea markets. 

I would tell the students about an installation piece by Max Dean, an artist who works with found family photographs. Dean asks whether images that have lost their original owners and contexts have become devoid of meaning, or whether we have a responsibility to rescue them from final destruction. He also asks if they can then be infused with new life. His installation piece, As Yet Untitled, invites viewers to step in and prevent a robotic machine from shredding found family photographs. Visitors had the opportunity to decide the fate of these images. The Images could be claimed, but they then became the responsibility of the new owner. 

We would then do a simulation of a similar exercise with found photographs and I would ask students to intuitively select one of them and try to step into the photograph and speak from the perspective of one of the sitters. This would often lead to students developing a real sense of empathy through the process of slow looking and their own imaginative investment. 

Barthes’ there then had become the here now. 

But this exercise also helped them to reflect on the simultaneous presence of the photograph they inhabited while also acting as a stark reminder of the sitter’s absence and the time that had passed. 

Students were encouraged to work in an interpretive way with personal archive materials and make connections that transcend their own experiences. 

I have included a small selection of project examples that were included in the Routledge publication Phototherapy and Therapeutic Uses of Photography in a Digital Age. 

Phototherapy book 

Example: Donna

Donna had lost her grandmother, who lived abroad. Before she and her parents could get there, the local council had already cleared her grandmother’s flat as another family member had given the council permission to do so. Donna felt bereft at the loss of her grandmother’s photo albums. 

She reflected that she,

had not realized before doing this project how much I missed not having a substantial historical photographic record of my Grandparents and distant relatives, doing this project helped me to accept this reality. 

Donna had resorted to working with a small collection of found photographs, which she had sourced at a local antiques market. Each photograph depicted the same woman at different stages of her life. Donna connected with the unknown woman and used these images as a ‘stand in’ for the loss of her own grandmother’s photographs. As part of the project, she wrote a letter to her grandmother, sharing her feelings for her. She noted that 

To find this way of working, in using photography as a means to both work through and process unresolved emotions was refreshing at a time when I was questioning how and why I wanted to make photographic work.

Example: Richard

Richard worked with a photograph of his parents that had been taken shortly after they met. He made a slide which he projected into the photography studio and then took a photograph of himself looking at his future parents, as they appear to be walking towards him. He wrote that, 

As I project myself back into their past, I do not recognize the people I see before me. But my mother seemingly looks up, smiles and sees me. Even though I would not be born for another twenty years she recognizes me as a ghost from her future life. A life she is just beginning to imagine. 

Example: Holly 

Holly wanted to make a project about her sister Amber, who had died following a short illness at a young age before Holly was born. With her mother’s support and encouragement, she decided to reinsert photographs of her sister into the same spaces of the family home that the family had continued to live in. Holly had decided that she would take these new photographs herself, she had to hold her camera in the other hand to focus and press the shutter and sought to emulate the muted and natural colours of the original photographs. As the past is anchored firmly in the camera’s frame and is foregrounded, the present slips away as the background is deliberately slightly blurred. Holly’s dual role as family archivist and contemporary image maker reintroduces her sister Amber into the home. 

Her methodology both contains and preserves the photographs of her sister, and she also articulates a relationship with her. 

She subsequently reflected that, 

It was important to have left home, to have gone to Uni. And to have returned and to have taken out the albums. 

The photos did not often get looked at, but we knew they were there. The process of going through the archive was painful.

The prints I took are on the wall in the staircase now. 

My mother put them up.

Professional and Institutional Archives

Over my career, I have had the immense privilege to work with several professional photographers’ archives and in some instances to get to know and become close friends with the photographer. I have selected a small number of projects representing this strand of my research to illustrate ways in which these archives can be reassessed and mobilised to reconnect with the communities where the original images were taken. I have also included an example of a local community archive that ended up being stored in an institutional archive. 

Professional Archives: A Civil Engineer’s Photographic Archive

The first example I want to share from 2009, was an interdisciplinary project with colleagues from the University of Brighton. Led by Dr. Dora Carpenter-Latiri, a writer, academic and artist from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, whose father was the eminent Tunisian engineer Mokhtar Latiri, along with colleague Dr. Karin Jaschke from the School of Architecture. 

We received an exploratory grant to view Mokhtar Latiri’s extensive photographic archive documenting the postcolonial reconstruction period, the country’s infrastructure and rural and urban development. Following Tunisian independence in 1958, Mokhtar Latiri became the lead engineer of public works. In this role, he was responsible for the design of major buildings and infrastructures across the country, including the international airports in Tunis and Djerba, and the port of Gabes. 

The three of us travelled to Tunis to engage with the archive, which was still stored in folders and boxes across many bookcases at the family home of Mokhtar Latiri, who had passed away two years earlier. 

During our stay, we revisited some of the locations featured, taking responsive photographs. Latiri had documented the Old City Wall to the entrance of La Goulette, where a natural channel had once connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Lake of Tunis. 

In Matmata, southern Tunisia, we met with residents from local communities including the Berber women, Fatma Nasser and Mongia Laribi.

Dr. Dora Carpenter-Latiri continued to progress the project, organizing conferences, and writing several publications, including a definitive book about her father's life and work, which interweaves his biography with photographs, documents and text from the archive and her own images. The National School for Engineers in Tunis, which Mokhtar Latiri founded and led, now houses some of his photographic archives. Other elements of the archive will soon be held in the National Archives of Tunisia.

A Living and Community Archive: Unpacking the History of the Memory of a Town

After graduation, I continued to live in my Great Aunt’s Peacehaven bungalow. Over the years I became embedded and very attached to the location. I began to document the changes I saw happening around me and learn more about Peacehaven’s unique history and genesis as an interwar speculative development promoted as an Edenic garden city by the sea. Through frequent visits to the town’s library, Michelle Brooker the librarian tipped me off that a large collection had been donated. This was the Troak-Poplett collection, began by two local collectors, Bob Poplett and Malcolm Troak, and amalgamated after their deaths. It contained 21 archive boxes full of blueprints, photographs, documents, and other ephemera relating to the town’s inception and early history. I realised that along with the several years of earlier research I had embarked upon, this would be a great subject for my PhD thesis which I completed in 2019 Fabricating Lureland: A History of The Imagination and Memory of Peacehaven, turned into a book published by DeGruyter in 2022.

I was put in touch with a local heritage lottery grant initiative and was asked to develop workshops and facilitate reminiscence sessions at the library with older residents who wanted to share their memories and experiences and learn more about the town’s history. This core of the group coalesced into a regular meeting and called themselves the Peacehaven Pioneers as many of them had grown up in Peacehaven during the interwar and early stages of the town’s development.

Through photo elicitation and creative writing sessions, participants recorded their own experiences, and we put together a travelling exhibition and made a community calendar. We went on field trips to the County Archives at the Keep and Brighton University library. The group continued to meet for many years every month at the Peacehaven library, engaging with the Troak-Poplett collection before it was finally moved to the Keep. Encouraged by the participatory engagement exercises the participants began to appreciate the significance and value of sharing their own life stories and how they connected to the history of memory of the place and their community. They generously gave me permission to include their stories and personal photographs in my thesis.

As an example, former schoolteacher Reuben Lanham reflected on the early years of the town and history predating:

Peacehaven was born seven years before me. It was a hybrid, unsure of where it belonged. Whether to the wild west or suburbia. … I noticed some interesting traces of an earlier existence, one that partook of the ancient villages around: a flint wall here and there, a wall that had once been in use, remnants of a sunken road that still bore a few primroses on its banks […] 

We also organised several site-specific events where we utilised the promenade and cliff face for projection and in local churches. 

For example, as part of Town Council Centenary celebrations in 2016, when our event was referred to as “Our story on the cliffs’.

Beginning with a photograph from an Institutional Archive: From Streets to Playgrounds

In 2013 I was invited by my former MA supervisor Professor Adrienne Chambon to apply for funding for a joint cross institution / cross discipline project ‘From Streets to Playgrounds’ initially institutional activating archives as dialogical encounter.

Beginning with a single image we spotted in the City of Toronto digital online archive, taken by a government commissioned photographer Arthur Goss in 1912 to take photos of neighbourhoods in the city ear marked for demolition. The accidental capture of children playing in the street, and their sense of agency and autonomy, even though that had not been the intended reason for the making of the photograph, led us to explore other sets of archival images where children had featured as incidental subjects, but with a level of autonomy. 

Carlton Hill Revisited

This process led us into looking at other cities that went through similar processes of neighbourhood clearance in the first part of the 20th century, and I discovered that photos taken similarly in Brighton in the 1930s for slum clearance purposes also featured children. This strand of the project spun into a series of projection events and exhibitions at the main Jubilee library. 

Marilyn Stafford’s Photographs of Les Enfants de la Cité Lesage-Bullourde recirculate in Time and Space, opening up new conversations

Through a lucky coincidence, I met Marilyn Stafford at Shoreham Word fest where she was giving a talk about her life in Photography. I was drawn to a group of schoolboys laughing and helping each other climb on a wall.  I learned that she was a retired professional photographer, who had moved from the US to Paris only a few years after the end of World War II. 

As often as possible, she would step out with her Rolleiflex camera and venture off by bus to discover new parts of the city, looking to take candid street photographs. On one of these days, she found herself in the Bastille area, and went down a narrow alleyway, which led her into the Cité Lesage Bullourde, a small, enclosed working-class neighbourhood. There, she met lots of children playing and posing for her. 

Most of the negatives made that day were lost when a moving company mislaid some of her moving boxes many years later. But eight contact sheets and a small number of negatives and vintage prints survived. These are precious surviving fragments of an underrepresented working-class neighbourhood, that was demolished in 1961, leading to the dispersal of residents to high-rise buildings on the suburbs within less than a decade of Marilyn’s chance visit. 

Seventy years on, Marilyn gave me permission to reshare her photographs as part of the wider Canadian research project. During 2017, I curated an exhibition of her photographs in the Pierre Leon gallery in Toronto. 

The exhibition received much publicity and coverage, especially in the Francophone media, and the leading newspaper covered the exhibition under a title that underlined its significance, so that the children of Paris after the war are no longer ‘invisible’.  We made extensive use of social media and Instagram as platforms to send, receive and recirculate some of the photographs. This led to me being contacted via Instagram by a former resident of the Cité, Alain Dupont, who offered illuminating commentary. 

Born in the Cité in 1947, he started responding to Marilyn’s photographs, sent photographs from his own family album and that of a friend, and confirmed the exact locations of Marilyn’s photographs within the Cité on a map from 1959, which I had reprinted in the exhibition catalogue. Over time, more residents got in touch to share documents and images, which all have helped to broaden the storyline, identify some of the children and adults in Marilyn’s photographs and name them. 

The most moving encounter occurred in 2020, when Marilyn met Alain online as part of a symposium, hosted by the Sorbonne in Paris, and which I had organized to coincide with an online exhibition of her work. Alan told Marilyn how important her photographs are to him, and Marilyn shared her delight and responded that it meant a lot to her that her photographs hold so much meaning for him, and for other people with personal connections to the Cité. 

She expressed her feeling that, 

photography or photographs should not just be dead items, a thing that one collects and sticks on the wall. I love the feeling that it has a relevance and a personal sense and for this reason I am just delighted that these children are coming back to life, for me, for them and for their families.  

With the support of the director of the organisation Fotodocument, Nina Emett, Marilyn set up an annual photo reportage  award, which supports professional female documentary photographers worldwide, and I greatly encourage you to also look at the monograph, Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography, published in 2021, which was edited by Nina together with Marilyn’s daughter Lina. 

Reopening Wolf Suschitzky’s Archive for the Present and the Future

The final story I want to share features photographs made by the émigré photographer Wolf Suschitzky, whose international career in film and photography spanned 70 years. 

I had first met Wolf in 2001 when I interviewed him for a book project, and we remained friends until his death in 2016 at the age of 104. 

Over the years I had written about his work extensively, but I was unaware that in 1959, he had been commissioned to take photographs of the first nine British New Towns, including Crawley, within ten years after their initial construction. 

It wasn’t until I did a research residency at Fotohof Salzburg, which now holds most of his photographic archive, that I came across several large contact sheet books filled with beautiful contact sheet images of British New Towns, including Crawley, Harlow and Basildon. 

Fotohof’s remit is to encourage a ‘living archive’ – through working with museums and educational institutions, they support the use of archival photographs for creative and cultural engagement. So, when I suggested that we try to return some of these photographs back to the places where Wolf had taken them, they were very happy to scan in as many of the contact sheet images as would be needed. 

With the help of a small AHRC Ignite grant, and supported by Fotohof, town planning colleague Georgia Wrighton, and Crawley Museum’s Jo and Mick, I put on an exhibition of Wolf’s Crawley New Town photographs at Crawley Museum. 

The exhibition attracted 3000 visitors from diverse ages and backgrounds, the largest visitor number for any of the exhibitions there thus far. Museum staff and volunteers hosted many school visits, a community engagement workshop and gallery tours. 

Local resident Ian Jenkins came to see the exhibition on the very first day it opened and couldn’t believe it when he recognized his aunt Margaret in the main exhibition photograph, taken in the Tilgate neighbourhood, and realizing that he was the baby in the pram.  65 years had passed, and Ian told us that his parents had moved to Crawley in the late 1950s so that his father could work on the Manor Royal Industrial Estate as an aircraft engineer. Ian came to several events, helping us add further context to some of Wolf’s photographs. 

Over the course of the exhibition, other visitors also recognized parents, siblings, aunts and uncles. 

The Crawley Writers group responded to the photographs through poetry and short stories. Kev Neylon noticed in his piece,  

How much has changed from the not very distant past. Sixty-six years is no time at all in a four-billion-year history of the planet.  I sit at the edge of Queens Square, with what was once the Queensway department store looming over my left shoulder, now being underutilised as Decathlon […]

The people passing are dressed so differently from that time, and now no vehicles get near the square. It makes me think. Who is documenting this town today. Will those photographs be available for future generations to stand and inspect. When we are in 2091, who will have been this year’s Wolf Suschitzky?

Conclusion, acknowledgements and bibliography 

A Return to the Jo Spence Archive

I hope I have inspired you to go through your own attics, look under your beds, look anew at

your dusty family albums and maybe even begin to look out for orphaned images and explore

the opportunities for visual storytelling and reconnecting the past with the present. 

As you have seen, engaging in photography projects can lead to incredible insights for

participants, and a renewed sense of self, solidarity, connection and agency. Some of the

projects I have discussed have had cathartic outcomes, and many have led onto further photography, writing or film projects. I hope that by opening up archives for new audiences, and drawing on the material’s responsive potential, photographs can be understood as an ever-evolving memory practice, rather than a closed record.

The photo historian Elizabeth Edward has observed that, photographs collide, spill, jolt and swirl in ever shifting sets of relationships, constituting and reconstituting the past and its relationship with the present (2022, 32).

I want to conclude where I began this talk. My first encounter with the work of Jo Spence thirty

years ago, led to me meeting her former partner and long-term collaborator Terry Dennett at

the first Canadian Jo Spence retrospective in 1995. Terry became a friend when I moved to

England in 1998, and over time, he entrusted me with some of his own archival material, tapes,

documents, books. 

Some of these have now fed into a trilogy of new publications, foregrounding the work of Jo Spence and Terry Dennett, which I acted as series advisory editor for. The trilogy was published by Museums Etc. 

All these photographs and stories shared contribute to a collective and cultural archive, that can be opened up again in the future. 

Acknowledgments

My thanks to all former and current project collaborators, community photographers, students, too numerous to all name here. With special thanks to:

Ian Hockaday, Fotohof Salzburg, Kurt Kaindl, Suschitzky Donat Family Estate, Adrienne Chambon, Deborah Barndt, Estate of Marilyn Stafford, Alain Dupont, Lina Clarke, Nina Emett, Dora Carpenter-Latiri, Paul and Roxana Newman, Mate Ni Kane, all of the Agadez community photographers, Ahmed Mouta, Sarhid Efes Hamadalher, Thomas Knoll. At SOAS: John Hollingworth, Anita Chrowdry. At Manx National Heritage: Yvonne Cresswell. Charmian Brinson. At Crawley Museum’s Jo Pettipher, Mick and Lulu Waters, Ian Jenkins, Georgia Wrighton. Former UoBrighton students Holly Oliver, Richard Clayton, Donna Clarke. TOE’s Ki Wong, Yuetna Tse, all of the artist educators and participants.  Del Loewenthal, Vince Peckham, Thomas Knoll, Josefina Chavez, Anke and Lutz Winckler, Peacehaven Pioneer Group, Les Hunter, Haydn Williams, Margaret Parks, Margaret Palmer. Serge Clifford, Christine Graham, Ceza da Luz, Mustafa Mersinoglu. Vid Ingelevics, Terry Dennett, Graeme Farnell & Shirley Read.

References 

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Assmann, A. (2011) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Assmann, J. (2000) Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Munich: C.H. Beck.

Barndt, D. (ed.) (2006) Wild Fire: Art as Activism. Toronto: Sumach Press.

Barndt, D. (ed.) (2011) VIVA! Community Arts and Popular Education in the Americas. Albany, NY: SUNY Press / Toronto: Between the Lines.

Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida. London: Fontana.

Bastian, J.A. and Alexander, B. (2009) Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory. London: Facet Publishing.

Benjamin, W. (1969) Illuminations. Edited by H. Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.

Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (1975) A Seventh Man: The Story of the Migrant Worker in Europe. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bober, R. and Perec, G. (1980) Récits d’Ellis Island: Histoires d’errance et d’espoir. Paris: Éditions P.O.L.

Conway, S. and Winckler, J. (2006) ‘Acts of embodiment: collaborations in phototherapy’, in Barndt, D. (ed.) Wild Fire: Art as Activism. Toronto: Sumach Press.

Edwards, E. (1999) ‘Photographs as objects of memory’, in Material Memories. Oxford: Berg.

Edwards, E. (2021) Photographs and the Practice of History: A Short Primer. London; New York; Dublin: Bloomsbury.

Ewald, W., Hyde, K. and Lord, L. (2012) Literacy and Justice through Photography: A Classroom Guide. New York: Teachers College Press.

Frenkel, V. (2002) ‘A tangled triangle: strands from the archive-rhizome’, in Comay, R. (ed.) Lost in the Archives. Toronto: Alphabet City Media.

Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ingelevics, V. (2005) ‘Damage done: materializing the photographic image’, Prefix Photo, 11.

Langford, M. (2006) [2001] Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Rose, G. (2013) Visual Methodologies. London: Sage.

Spence, J. (1988) ‘Visual autobiography: beyond the family album 1979’, in Putting Myself in the Picture. Seattle: The Real Comet Press.

Spence, J. & Holland Patricia. 1991 Family snaps : the meanings of domestic photography. Spence, Jo. Holland, Patricia, London : Virago. 

Stafford, Marilyn (2021) A Life in Photography. Nina Emett, Lina Clarke (Eds). Bluecoat: Liverpool.

Winckler, J. (2020) Photographic Memories – Lost Corners of Paris: The Children of Cité Lesage-Bullourde and Boulogne-Billancourt, 1949–1954 | Mémoires photographiques des coins perdus: Les enfants de la Cité Lesage-Bullourde et Boulogne-Billancourt. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle.

All photographs Julia Winckler, unless otherwise stated

Website https://www.juliawinckler.com/