A picture may tell a thousand words, but what if the image is distorted or the meaning misconstrued? The newly published Photographs, Histories, and Meanings, co-edited by 91亚色 Professor Marlene Kadar, re-examines photographs and their social history, exploring the ideological, ethical, political and esthetic forces that influence their interpretation.
Photographs, Histories, and Meanings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) looks at how photographs have shaped public perception and social meaning for the last century and a half. Its contributors trace shifting historical contexts, intentional or accidental interpretive distortions, and ambiguous and multiple meanings.
They search for the answers to how images can be believed given the public鈥檚 awareness of the uncertainty of meaning. In the end, the contributors believe the histories conveyed in these photographs tell the stories of our lives. To know the photographs is to know ourselves with all our ambiguities, distortions and complexities on display.
鈥淢any photographs had a particular meaning at the time they were taken, but now something dramatic or traumatic has happened to change the way we鈥檝e received these images,鈥 says Kadar. She points to the practice of Nazi photographers taking photographs of concentration camps as they were constructed or altered so as to maintain a record of them. The photos were also used to demonstrate to organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross that nothing was amiss in the camps鈥 operations.
Photos taken of Ravensbr眉ck Concentration Camp portray women working on camp grounds, appearing healthy, well-nourished and adequately dressed, says Kadar. But these photos were completely staged. Some contemporary scholars, however, refer to them in their research as if they were accurate depictions of daily life. She contends that people must be vigilant in their interpretation of archival and artifactual materials, considering them in the context of politics, culture and history.
Right: Marlene Kadar
The essays in Photographs, Histories, and Meanings, range from 鈥淪trange Birth: Reading Hands, Reflecting Race in Richard Wright鈥檚 Twelve Million Black Voices鈥 by Petra Dreiser and 鈥淎mbivalent Image: Twisted Use鈥 by Kadar to 鈥淐aptured Childhoods: Photographs in Indian Residential School Memoir鈥 by Linda Warley and 鈥淒ocumenting Disaster: Rothstein鈥檚 鈥楽teer Skull鈥 and the Use of Photographic Evidence in Environmental and Political Narratives鈥 by James Hewitson.
Kadar is a humanities and women鈥檚 studies professor in聽91亚色's Faculty of Liberal Arts聽& Professional Studies聽and former director of the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Faculty of Graduate Studies. She is the editor of the at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, which to date has published聽38 books, and is the literary editor of Canadian Woman Studies. Previous edited works include the reader Reading Life Writing (Oxford University Press, 1993) and Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 1992), which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Criticism聽in 1993.
She also co-edited Tracing the Autobiographical with Jeanne Perreault, Linda Warley and Susanna Egan. Her current research focuses on the life and career of a former concentration camp guard, and on the memoir of a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust who spent the most difficult years in the former Yugoslavia.
In 2008, Kadar was聽named one of Canada鈥檚 most powerful women in the category of Trailblazers聽& Trendsetters by the Women鈥檚 Executive Network (WXN), an advocacy organization for women in the workplace. She was one of 100 top female winners chosen in eight categories from across Canada. Her聽inclusion in聽Canada's聽Most Powerful Women: Top 100 by WXN recognizes her work in forging a new path for autobiography.
Photographs, Histories, and Meanings was co-edited聽with Warley, an English professor at the University of Waterloo, and Perreault, an English professor at the University of Calgary.
Republished courtesy of YFile 鈥 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.