Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance

Since its invention, photography has always been inextricably tied up with remembrance: photographers recall family, beloved friends, special moments, trips and other events, speaking across time and place to create an emotional bond between subject and viewer. <BR><I>Forget Me Not</I> focuses on this relationship between photography and memory, and explores the curious and centuries-old practice of strengthening the emotional appeal of photographs by embellishing them -- with text, paint, frames, embroidery, fabric, string, hair, flowers, bullets, cigar wrappers, butterfly wings, and more -- to create strange and often beautiful hybrid objects. This spellbinding book features color photographs of eighty such objects, extraordinary works of art -- part memento, part Joseph Cornell -- created by ordinary people from the mid-19th century to mid-20th century.<BR>In addition, <I>Forget Me Not</I> offers an alternative way to look at the history of photography, a history that effectively excludes most of the photographs -- candid views, family snapshots, and the like -- taken since the invention of the camera. Noted photography historian Geoffrey Batchen adopts a different tone in this original and engaging book -- a personal and speculative voice that speaks to the objects rather than about them while offering a visual treasure chest of both mysterious and beautiful images. <BR><I>Forget Me Not</I> is published with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and accompanies an exhibition of the same name that opens at the Museum in March 2004.