Suspended Conversations

An innovative way of looking at photographic albums as an extension of oral tradition.

Exhibiting a collection of photographic travelogues, memoirs, thematic collections, and family sagas compiled between 1860 and 1960 and held by the McCord Museum of Canadian History, this second edition includes a revised and expanded preface along with new photographs of the Notman albums.

In Suspended Conversations Martha Langford shows how photographic albums tell intimate and revealing stories about individuals and families. Rather than isolate the individual photograph, treat albums as texts, or argue that photography has supplanted memory, she demonstrates that the photographic album must be taken as a whole and interpreted as a visual and verbal performance that extends oral consciousness.

Exhibiting a collection of photographic travelogues, memoirs, thematic collections, and family sagas compiled between 1860 and 1960 and held by the McCord Museum of Canadian History, this second edition includes a revised and expanded preface along with new photographs of the Notman albums. Printed in colour throughout, the enhanced material draws out the distinct nuances and details of each album, giving them new life to tell their stories. Albums are treasured by families, collected as illustrations of the past by museums of social history, and examined by scholars for what they can reveal about attitudes and sensibilities, but when no one is left to tell the tale, the intrigue of the album becomes a puzzle, a suspended conversation. Langford argues that oral consciousness provides the missing key. Correlating photography and orality, she explains how albums were designed to work as performances and how we can unlock their mysteries.

A fascinating glimpse of the preoccupations of previous centuries, Suspended Conversations brings photography into the great conversation of how we remember and how we send our stories into the future.