Oral History and Photography

This essay collection explores the "photographic turn" in oral history. Contributors ask how oral historians can best use photographs in their interviewing practice and how they can best understand photographs in their interpretation of oral histories. The authors present a dozen case studies from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In exploring the intersection of oral history and photography, they complicate and move beyond the use of photographs as social documents and memory triggers and demonstrate how photographs frame oral narratives and how stories unsettle the seeming fixity of photographs' meanings.

Alexander Freund is an associate professor of history and holds the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He published Aufbrüche nach dem Zusammenbruch, a history of German migration to North America after the Second World War, and edited a forthcoming essay collection on German-Canadian Studies. He is the co-director of the University of Winnipeg's Oral History Centre, co-president of the Canadian Oral History Association, and co-editor of the Association's journal, Oral History Forum d'histoire orale. He is a former Council Member of the International Oral History Association. Alistair Thomson is a professor of history at Monash University in Australia. He co-edited the British journal Oral History from 1991 to 2007 and was President of the International Oral History Association from 2006 to 2008. His oral history publications include: Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend (1994), The Oral History Reader (1998 and 2006, with Robert Perks), Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants (2005, with Jim Hammerton), and Moving Stories, Women's Lives (2011).

'The sensitive use of photographs by these oral historians has drawn fascinating, sometimes spellbinding, tales from both the tellers and the listeners. This is an important collection that will instruct and inspire future research at the crossroads of photography, orality, memory, and history.'—Martha Langford, author of Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art 'An evocative, much-needed international collection exploring the fascinating intersection between the oral and visual. Twelve pointed and diverse case studies, framed by an extensive introductory essay, map a surprisingly rich terrain. One axis involves reflections on photo-elicitation as a helpful but far-from-straightforward interview technique. Another involves issues of memory and interpretation in oral history, issues complicated in provocative ways by the counterpoint with photographic evidence (and vice versa). A third dimension, perhaps the most novel, demonstrates how enriched documentary and interactive possibilities for family, community, and public discourse can be unfolded through leveraging the productive tension between voice and eye, from representation to reception.' —Michael Frisch, co-author, with photographer Milton Rogovin, of Portraits in Steel

'This is a terrific book. The collection addresses key issues in the correlation of the visual and verbal that are particularly salient as digital communication challenges the boundaries of many disciplines, the nature of history and oral history itself, and the possibilities for engaged oral history or advocacy and interpretive action. The book as a whole is remarkably well-written. It has the analytical grain and authorial modesty I have come to admire in the best oral history work. This collection will certainly complement and extend the emerging literatures on visual study, visual culture, new documentary, and 'sensory' ethnography. Accordingly, I expect it will significantly enhance the stature and reach of oral history.' - Della Pollock, professor of Performance and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill