“Scissors, Paper Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art” by Martha Langford

Even before the cover is lifted, the dust jacket of Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, suggests that the contents are likely to be challenging and provocative. How, one may ask of the title, can scissors, paper and stone, either independently or as in the well-known hand game, collectively, be related to expressions of memory in photographic art?

The title is indeed drawn from the game, which serves both as a structure for the book and a framing metaphor for the variety of ways in which a photograph may lead a viewer along a path between perception and memory. As such, it is a complex and exceedingly elegant metaphor— like much else in this book, not so easily explained or understood but well worth the effort. Langford takes the better part of a page to elucidate the parallels with her subject; in short though, and in her own words, scissors “represent the joust between remembering and forgetting; paper, the meeting ground for memory and imagination; and stone, the relationship between memory and history.” The game, Langford says, “focuses attention on the power of the invisible,” the implicit presence of that absent, third element.

The book is divided into three sections, each named for one of the titular elements. Each section contains a number of short chapters in which Langford presents works from a broad variety of photographers—all, incidentally, Canadian—and examines them in relation to different aspects of each metaphoric component. A significant feature of the book is the high-quality reproductions of all of the works discussed. This is much appreciated, given how seldom it occurs.

As Martha Langford says in her introduction, there is a growing appetite for memory in all fields of endeavour. Nowhere is this truer than in the arts where it features prominently in much postmodernist expression and where, since at least the mid-1970s, visual artists especially have increasingly employed or incorporated mnemonic technologies in their work. It is astonishing, then, that while the subject has been variously addressed by commentators from almost every academic field, there are so few, coherent, book-length examinations of the revelation of memory in works of photographic art. Much of the reason, I suspect, lies in the fact that, as with so many things that on the surface seem obvious—after all, what could be more self-evident than the relationship between photography and memory—the more deeply one examines the subject, the more subtle, nuanced and complex it becomes. Amongst those that do exist—Geoffrey Batchen’s Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance and Annette Kuhn’s Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination come most immediately to mind—for all their value, the tendency has been to focus rather narrowly on the particular author’s field of study.

Langford’s approach, however, is broadly interdisciplinary. An art historian and independent curator, she references not only her own practice but, equally or perhaps even more, an extraordinarily wide spectrum of other academic disciplines as well: cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, phenomenology, ethics, ethnography, historiography and criminology. Indeed, the scope and depth of her research is breathtaking; her bibliography alone fills more than 20 pages that, let me quickly add, should not be taken to imply that Scissors, Paper, Stone is in any way a dry, academic tome. Nothing could be further from the truth; yes, its academic credentials are unquestionable and the quality of its postulates and rendering of its arguments persistently rigorous, yet it is the antithesis of dry. For this, credit first that eccentric, guiding metaphor. At first it seemed overly vague, too imprecise, too peripherally related to its referent, too clever in fact and yet, as I advanced through the book, and my engagement grew, so did my appreciation of its power. For, whenever I sensed even the mildest disjuncture between image and metaphor, image and argument—and they erupt constantly—I found almost irresistible the urge to enter into silent debate with the author or the image and even the photographer. Second, there is Langford’s writing. Her style is consistently articulate and clear, and while certainly dense, this stems more from poetic economy than any tendency toward the sometimes seemingly willful obscurantism of “art speak.” There is the feeling that every sentence, every word has been carefully examined, re-examined and refined. There is no excess. Equally, Langford’s language is, by-and-large, familiar and accessible, with less common terms being used only when they contribute either a necessary precision or compactness of form.

For all its accessibility, though, this is not a book that can be taken lightly. There is a highly disciplined intelligence at play here and it demands full attention from its audience. Langford has a long, intimate and thoroughgoing knowledge of her subject. The relationship between photography and memory has long absorbed her attention, and I would venture there are few, if any, who have thought more or are better informed about the subject. Further, in her earlier career she was the founding director and, for nine years, chief curator of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, a position that brought her into day-to-day contact with some of the most interesting artists in the country and allowed her access to a direct experience of their works. Many of these are featured in her book.

Langford’s first book, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums, remains a significant contribution to the literature and is a direct antecedent to the present volume. Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art complements the earlier work and greatly extends upon it. Demanding, yet utterly absorbing, it can be read as a piece or, and this is what I would recommend, be absorbed slowly over time, piece by piece, chapter by chapter, relished. ■

Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, Martha Langford, Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, cloth, 352 pp, 80 black-and-white and 16 colour photographs, $55.00.

Susan Close is a photographer and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba.