[Personal_archives] Photography and Personal Archives

[Martha Langford]

Good morning everyone,

First I want to thank Catherine Hobbs for this kind invitation into the 
archivists' realm, a place where I have made many fruitful discoveries 
in the past, having found the subject of /Suspended Conversations/ in 
the Notman Photographic Archives here in Montreal. Her welcoming remarks 
about the navigations between private and public realms take me back to 
those days, and the first recognition that we should not consider 
photographs and albums in a public collection as private, but as 
inhabiting and informing a space between the private and the public 
realms. So the first question that I am considering is: how do we frame 
that space; how do we define it? I would like to establish a framework 
that has some solid features, before we begin to talk about its porous 
boundaries, shifts, and fissures. Barthes helps us to understand the 
sense of loss that inhabits that place, but if it were strictly morbid, 
always as sad as /Camera Lucida/, I don't think many of would want to 
stay there, work there, root our lives there. There is pleasure in this 
place. Can we also talk about that, as a product of the imagination, as 
a prompt for conversation? After all, that's what we're having.

Martha