Essay: Familienfotografie, alltägliches diasporisches Gedächtnis und der Umgang mit postkolonialer Erfahrung [Personal photography, vernacular memory, and the management of postcolonial experience]

It is commonplace to conceive of photography as the media of memory par excellence. However, much analytical attention has been paid to the possibilities and limits of photography in communicating experiences which exceed or trouble western photographic norms and conventions. The feminist work of Kuhn and Walkerdine amongst others has focused on the absences and lacunae in our most familiar images, while the work of Sontag and Zelizer has considered the limits of photography in representing public forms of suffering that sit at the very limits of our comprehension. We take this as our starting point in order to consider the role of personal photography in the mnemonic management of postcolonial experience. The essay will consider transcultural forms of loss and absence encountered in processes of migration by diasporic communities, particularly the South Asian diaspora in the UK. We argue that creative remembering with photography offers opportunities for engaging with and speaking back to the power inequalities which structure postcolonial experience and ways of reconciling transcultural losses into personal and collective identity narratives, although always within the confines of the ideological conventions of domestic and vernacular photography.