The Politics of Visual Memory

Abstract

As part of the research for this book, one interviewee, after an extended interview, guided me into the front sitting-room to show me photographs of one of the Bloody Sunday dead. Recalling that in the early 1970s the loss associated with his death was too great for participating in the annual commemorative march, in the 1990s this interviewee went on the march and become more involved in and an active member of the then emerging Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC). For this respondent, as, seemingly, for others, private memory was quarantined from public communal remembrance because the working through and processing of private remembrance associated with loss and bereavement took place at a slower pace than public commemoration. From the 1990s, the tempo of public commemoration of the event intensified and relied heavily on the mobilization of visual resources — 1 ike photographs — to relate the event to new publics.