This chapter is an experiment in imaginative dialogue. It is co-authored but also calls upon 19th century authors Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Anna Atkins to act as spirit guides in the use of fiction to explore a relationship between the family photograph and autobiographical memory. In an extension of Roland Barthes' biographeme, it discusses the idea that photographic, and photographed, objects can become nexuses that connect, stimulate, and radiate autobiographical memories. It champions imaginary involvement and an emotional response to the family photograph as a way of giving voice to the voiceless. The chapter is split into two interrelated voices. Voice 1 focuses on the methods and processes involved in creating fictional dialogues with photographic objects. Voice 2 creates a series of fictional dialogues with a collection of photographic images scattered randomly throughout the text. The reader is encouraged to read the text in any order.
TopPreamble
Snapshots in the family photo album remind us of our past selves and landmark events in our personal histories (Lopez, 2018, p.173)
This chapter is an experiment in imaginative dialogue. It aims to use and examine fiction as a tool for exploring the relationship between the family photograph and autobiographical memory. In doing so it calls into question the popular idea encapsulated in Lopez’s words (above), that the family photograph can be decoded to reveal the particular biography or history of the family members depicted. Instead, the chapter posits that the interaction between photograph and fiction cause new bodies and histories to coalesce and disperse. To explore this idea the chapter seeks to create a dialogue between Roland Barthes’ biographeme and Guattari’s refrain to discuss the idea that photographic, and photographed, objects can become nexuses that connect, stimulate, and radiate real and imagined autobiographical memories.
The chapter is structured using two voices. Voice 2 provides Interior Archives, four short pieces of fiction based upon the discovery of three family photograph albums. Voice 1, speaking now, takes on the more academic role, introducing the subject, providing commentary on, and analysis of, the ideas raised by Voice 2. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, Voice 1 also offers three interruptions to the fiction in which the key arguments are discussed. The idea that Voice 1 introduces, interrupts and analyses the work of the fictional voice is clearly problematic in an experiment that claims to champion fiction. Rather than be content with this duologue the chapter takes its lead from the multiplicity of voices in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (1980). As Franny states, you can’t be one wolf (or two?) “you’re always eight or nine’” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 50). As the readers will discover, Voice 2 has “a horde of wolves” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 3) in her throat and Voice 1’s attempts to rationalise Interior Archives only opens space for more wolves to pour in, in the form of the readers’ responses and narratives. Thus, it is hoped that the multiplicity of voices invoked in the fiction below may reduce Voice 1 until he becomes one of several. Voice 1 is also complicit in this project and begins the introduction by calling his own role into question via an examination of fictional photographs in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). Additionally, the introduction also summons two allies or spirit guides for Voice 2 in the form of novelists Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Both these authors are chosen because their writing gives agency to the domestic object where their female protagonists have none and it is this howl of the inanimate that provides an important clue as to how a fictional interaction with the family photograph can also give voice to the voiceless.
Each album had belonged to a different brother or sister and the photographs inside had been taken with different cameras, but the subjects often overlapped.