Photography, Music and Memory Pieces of the Past in Everyday Life

The two most salient technologies of remembering in everyday life are photography and recorded music. Photography, Music and Memory is a refreshing ethnographic study in which Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley explore how they act as vehicles or catalysts of memory. The book applies the concept of the mnemonic imagination, developed in their previous book, to the uses of these complementary technologies, showing how they contribute to distinct yet interrelated stages in the distillation of experience. In-depth comparative studies of visual and sonic media are rare. Pickering and Keightley make amends for this in a rich, detailed study of how these particular media inform and support our individual and collective understandings of the past. They draw on the extensive fieldwork they have conducted, and discuss the various ways in which the mnemonic resources associated with photography and recorded music are integral to vernacular memory, enhancing the multiple narratives we construct in our everyday social worlds.