Abstract
An examination of a series of recent newspaper articles, each of which is about the 're-discovery' of some previously anonymous person who had featured in a classic Australian photograph. I use Benjamin, as well as recent debates within historiography around the filiation of memory from history, to discuss this phenomenon. I discuss the photograph's peculiar relationship to both memory and history. I locate the new role for the historic photograph as somewhere between the artefactual aura of the classic painting and the discursive mutability of the computer file. I claim a new role for the press which now commands and curates a large archive of images from our past and hence, like public monuments and ceremonies, has a stake in recuperating memory to serve history.
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