It is really important in this theses to examine how memory mediates gender

identify in the domestic and how that is done through family album
photography.

My research aims are to explore how photography when remembering

reminiscing or commemorating the past through the family album is employed
to mediate:

1. certain dramatised rituals of longing and belonging that involve the use
of letters and photographs, engendered narratives that reproduce
stereotypes of femininity and masculinity as well as stereotypes of
manhood and womanhood, equivalently leaving, waiting and longing.
2. How does working with analysing photographs ―creatively‖ through
―memory work‖ methodology can enable individuals to reinvent ,
rearticulate, reinterpret the self as self, and the self as story ( image)
and renegotiate the somewhat inflexible gendered narratives about the
self that they perform through home family photographs
3. how do these ritually performed narratives of the self that employ
photography to manifest, influence the construction of cultural- social
and personal-psychological identity.
4. To disseminate my own creative process and frame my art practice as
a ―production of language‖ (a new communication code) belonging into
a community of artists dealing with similar issues.
5. How analysing photographs ―creatively‖ can enable individuals to
rearticulate, reinterpret the self as self, and the self as story ( image)
and renegotiate freely the somewhat inflexible gendered narratives
about the self that they perform through home family photographs

To do this I will be using a research methodology called memory work which

involves talking about significant family album pictures and thus investigate
how I participated in family rituals that involved photographs, letters and other
objects. Moreover it is important to decipher how these ritually performed
narratives of the self, influence the construction of cultural- social and
personal-psychological identity.

Remembering is not only about the past. Owning one‘s memories and past is
about being able to place oneself in the future. Memory is selective. We
choose to remember the good things. In that sense memory not unlike
photography, enables us to perform socially acceptable roles (family
photographs). In that sense memory is a political act. The associations of
memories (even if they are of an individual‘s), ‗spread into an extended
network of meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the
cultural, the economic, the social, the historical‘. (Kuhn A. 2000).

My father destroyed the family album when I was a teenager. This loss
devastated me. I became a photographer to symbolically resolve the issue by
rescuing the torn photographs and thus my family‘s memory. I studied