Suspended Conversations

Martha Langford is research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University and co-editor of Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City.Martha Langford is research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University.

"The notion that the album is meant to be performed, or orally narrated is appealing and credible, conjuring images of older family members identifying, remembering and explaining, while occasionally digressing into extraneous personal and family histories for a younger audience ... Photographic albums deserve close readers like this one." Border Crossings

"Martha Langford ... challenges the usual stress on photography as an exclusively visual medium in Suspended Conversations ... Langford is also profoundly aware that a photographic album begins a problematic, second life once it is deposited in an archive ... provide[s] preliminaries for an inclusive anthropology of photography that abandons, or downplays, aesthetic judgement." David Evans, Source

"Langford's book joins those few exceptional works, by scholars and writers from Roland Bathes to Pierre Bourdieu to Susan Sontag, which move these meaningful documents into the forefront of communication and cultural studies. Her thesis that these albums contain fundamentally oral mnemonic and symbolic structures is both innovative and insightful." Pauline Greenhill, co-editor of Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada

"This is a beautifully written work on photography and memory that at times startles with its poetry. Langford offers new insights into the understanding of visual technology, particularly as it breaks with a dominant scholarly mode that overwhelmingly tends to 'read' photographs as textual instances within a paradigm of visuality." Elizabeth Seaton, Communication Studies, Department of Social Sciences, York University

"Rich and informative, theoretically fluent and emotionally involving ... Langford's original achievement in Suspended Conversations is to show how even photographs whose stories have been almost forgotten can act as prompts or notations for a performance that needs to be enacted to be kept alive, not in an original state that never existed, but in a constant process of translation, according to clues found not between the lines of texts but between the photographs on the pages of albums." History of Photography