Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Photo Synthesis: The Expatriate Family Album As Historiography, Kamayani Sharma Ms

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I want to look at the expatriate family album as a site of history-writing.

Through an examination of three photographs from my childhood in West Asia, I try to think about the idea of historical space and time through the visual narratives available to me of my own family.

This essay will be an exploration of the way in which nostalgia for a personal past gets imbricated within the shared experience of a bygone cultural moment.

I am interested in how an encounter with visual material from private archives initiates memory work and how these traces from the past can …