Still Pictures On Photography and Memory

Janet Malcolm, Ian Frazier, Anne Malcolm

eBook - 2023

"Superb . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of [Janet Malcolm's] long career." —Charles Finch, The New York Times Book ReviewFor decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life—a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be.Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lu...cida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own. Still... more