Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory | 
pickMemory. So incomplete and flawed...
Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures is an autobiographical series of essays or perhaps an annotated photo album. She talks about the power of images, that photographs are more than just still moments frozen in time; they are windows into our history, emotions, and an understanding of the world. She writes about the difficulty we have evoking our former selves, the many ways in which they are strangers to us.
“The glitter of memory may be no less deceptive. The past is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally.“
I remember a story my mother told about an early brush with American alienness. She was at a dinner in an American household. The time for seconds arrived. When my mother was offered the platter, she declined. This was Prague etiquette....
But here "No, thank you" was taken to mean just that, and the platter of delicious American food was whisked away before my mother's sad eyes.
The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography, which gives it its vitality if not its raison d'être. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification-and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.
"Who asked you to tarnish my image with your miserable little hurts?" the dead person might reasonably ask
pick“Archives”was 1 of my favorite reads of the assortment we read for the #NYRBbookclub.Malcom tried to write a regular autobiography, then abandoned it.Here,she uses photographs from her past to generate wonderful autobiographical essays,about her family leaving Europe & becoming New Yorkers, her formative years ,even the lawsuit connected to the Archives book.A wonderful read , I love her attention to detail and the way she saw the world.Brilliant!
