School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemTelevision: presenting the memory machine( 1987)This essay situates developments in contemporary television in relation to the dominant social relations of time. It argues that time is a perpetual ‘problem’ for television, extending beyond the terms of configuring narrative formats and strategies of visual reflexivity, and instead indicating deeper epistemological and existential issues. While contemporary television programming often seems driven by a desire to give viewers the immediacy of a perpetual ‘now’, this creates a series of increasingly intense contradictions concerning the social experience of time and the functioning of memory.
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ItemThe public and the private: John Berger's writing on photography and memory(ANU Canberra School of Art Gallery, 2000)John Berger's writings on photography belong mostly to the 1970s. Like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Berger is an advocate of realism, although in neither a naive nor a simplistic fashion. I argue that Berger's writing on photography stands out firstly because of its refusal of a blanket response. Instead, the pivot of his analysis is ambiguity: on one level, the ambiguity of photographic meaning, but also the ambiguity of photographic practice due to the social and political contradictions in which the camera is embedded. This refusal to homogenise the entire field is important, because it allowed Berger to remain attentive, at a moment when many were not, to the different registers of photographic usage.
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ItemFlora's Box: Empty Space, Memory and Migration( 2003-09)This is the text version of a seminar delivered in the 'History and the Meaning of Things Seminar Series' at Melbourne Museum on 10th September 2003, and it follows the more informal style of an orally delivered paper. The paper takes as its point of departure a wooden box made for the author’s great-grandmother, and now in the possession of her mother, and uses it to reflect on the narratives produced inresearch on post-Second World War British migration to Australia. Noting how personal experience informs research, and drawing on interviews conducted with British migrants inFrankston, this paper discusses the voices that echo around objects such as Flora’s Box; both those that reflect memories under erasure and those coming to terms with their routes. A fuller version will be published; further details from the author at s.wills@unimelb.edu.au.