Oral History and Photography

This essay collection explores the "photographic turn" in oral history. Contributors ask how oral historians can best use photographs in their interviewing practice and how they can best understand photographs in their interpretation of oral histories. The authors present a dozen case studies from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In exploring the intersection of oral history and photography, they complicate and move beyond the use of photographs as social documents and memory triggers and demonstrate how photographs frame oral narratives and how stories unsettle the seeming fixity of photographs’ meanings.

Alexander Freund is an associate professor of history and holds the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He published Aufbruche nach dem Zusammenbruch, a history of German migration to North America after the Second World War, and edited a forthcoming essay collection on German-Canadian Studies. He is the co-director of the University of Winnipeg's Oral History Centre, co-president of the Canadian Oral History Association, and co-editor of the Association's journal, Oral History Forum d'histoire orale. He is a former Council Member of the International Oral History Association. Alistair Thomson is a professor of history at Monash University in Australia. He co-edited the British journal Oral History from 1991 to 2007 and was President of the International Oral History Association from 2006 to 2008. His oral history publications include: Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend (1994), The Oral History Reader (1998 and 2006, with Robert Perks), Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants (2005, with Jim Hammerton), and Moving Stories, Women's Lives (2011).