Photography and memory work: Rethinking autobiography in Family Secrets by Annette Kuhn

Préparation d'un article en coursInternational audienceIn her hybrid work Family Secrets, Annette Kuhn radically reworks the conventions of life writing. Merging autobiography with cultural criticism, her collection of essays does not set out to trace the making of a unique self, the way most autobiographies would, but explores instead the complex workings of memory and the deep connections between the individual self and society. To do so, Kuhn revisits her past through a personal archive of family pictures and public documents, submitting them to what she calls “memory work”, “an active practice of remembering which takes an enquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re) construction through memory.” (Kuhn 157)This paper will focus on the role played by family photographs in this exploration. These are not used for referential purposes, as a way to recover the past, but as an interpretative device, a way to unsettle it and show it as subject to a multiplicity of interpretations. Rereading family pictures through a method based on free association, Kuhn unleashes their subversive potential, bringing out family secrets and forgotten traumas. Trimmed and covered with inscriptions, these banal, apparently harmless testimonies of family life turn out to be at the heart of intense power plays. Pictures also allow Kuhn to explore the inscription of the self in social structures. Located at the intersection of private and public worlds, formal and ceremonial pictures are part of what Kuhn calls “popular memory”. They become invested with a memorial function, pointing to larger cultural evolutions in post-war Britain but also capturing more marginal trajectories; the undocumented plight of the “scholarship girl” torn between two worlds is thus given particular attention. Caught in a web of conflicting discourses, family photographs emerge in Kuhn’s essay as constantly open to reinterpretation, showing memory and the past as perpetually in the making. Kuhn’s goal is not merely deconstructive however: Primarily concerned with the significance of the past in the present (“the struggle is now, the past is made in the present”, 19), she turns life writing into an empowering, deeply relational enterprise that can delineate another future for the writing subject and her readers