Remembering the City - Memory Images in Momchedjikova, B (ed.) (2013) Captured by the City; Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies Cambridge Scholars Press

Abstract

Photographs, despite their representational realism and apparent immediacy do not necessarily provide straightforward access to the scenes or experiences they record. The possibility that photographs capture un-experienced events creates a parallel between the workings of the camera and the structure of memory. The project is an investigation into the relation of the photographic work to the world depicted, and the balance achieved between the neutral document, mirroring reality, and the latent criticism of that reality. Through a photographic practice that uses methods of visual ethnography, alongside an interest in the complexity of the relationship between urban representations, memory, place, and identity it is possible to piece together the particularities of lived experience.

Memory City documents a series of personal memories volunteered by inhabitants of Preston and an attempt to explore the relationship between personal memory and public space. It opens up a dialogue between the city’s population to encourage them to claim ownership over their public space by experiencing it as a dynamic site where private memories and a public present interact. One of the goals of the project is to explore people’s, shared and differing, senses of belonging and document the emotional histories that exist in the living memories of a city’s inhabitants; to enable a narration of the city ‘from below’ in order to expose the dynamic, personal qualities of urban change.