Understanding, Reactivating, and Reproducing Autobiographical Memory

Abstract

This chapter engages with the potential for historical personal archives to prompt autobiographical memory through discovery, digitisation, and processes of sharing. It uses one specific archive of photographs, accumulated by the writer's grandfather over 30 years and spanning different configurations of family and place, to analyse how personal memory and meaning are reproduced through photographs over time. Digitising analogue photographs draws them into new dialogues through the application of contemporary ways of seeing and presenting. This chapter interrogates how by extending possible audiences and enabling photographs to be seen in the present, personal and collective memories are renewed and altered as the memory text is changed. Personal archives generate different forms of autobiographical memory. This multiplicity is engaged with furthering understanding of how histories of seeing as well as belonging are recorded. Through these processes, this text examines what futures for archives such as these could look like.