by Jon Lackman | 8 January 2007 | Books, Photography
In CAA Reviews, Martha Langford considers Geoffrey Batchen’s Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance: “Rumors of a tight relationship between photography and memory have been circulating since the nineteenth century, despite the many objections raised in both scholarly and fanciful works. A feature of these attacks is the prosecutor’s reluctance to produce evidence … we are led by unseen generic images—led, in effect, by our imaginations—to turn our eyes inward and imagine that we are remembering. In Forget Me Not, Geoffrey Batchen does something different: he includes actual photographic images and considers their mnemonic function on the basis of what he—and we—can see. This is a very auspicious beginning to a book that fulfills its promise. Forget Me Not is about expressions of memory in photographic portraits, which Batchen culls from a large and lively inventory of images and photographically embellished objects produced between 1840 and 1970. These are primarily ordinary people’s pictures, windows into ordinary photographic experience.”
