The Photographic Memory Workshop originally consisted of a small group of graduate students and faculty from American Studies and African American Studies who wanted to surround photography and memory with questions. Now in its ninth year, and under the continued faculty guidance of Professor Laura Wexler, the expanding group boasts about 60 active and affiliated members from a multitude of academic disciplines and Yale institutions, including Art History, English, History, Architecture, Theater and Performance, Medicine, Psychology, Law, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The group fosters sustained cross-disciplinary conversation about the complex relationships between photography and individual and collective memory.

With funding from the Beinecke, the Whitney Humanities Center, and the Dean’s Fund for Research Workshops, Seminars, and Colloquia, PMW generally meets once a month to listen to speakers, share work with each other, discuss relevant readings, go on field trips, and explore the myriad of possibilities inherent in the study of photographs and/or memory. Past speakers have included such renowned thinkers as MacArthur Fellow and photographic historian Deborah Willis, feminist performance theorist Peggy Phelan, Professor Eduardo Cadava, photography theorist Geoffrey Batchen, photography historian Martha Sandweiss, Professor Shawn Michelle Smith, Professor Maren Stange, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey. In addition to these nationally based guests, the group has heard from international thinkers such as Professor Neloufer De Mel of the University of Columbo and filmmaker Robert Crusz, both from Sri Lanka, and Dr. Mona Ali with the Women and Memory Forum from the University of Cairo in Egypt. In spring of 2007, PMW and the World Performance Project at Yale co-sponsored a series of events with performance artist Coco Fusco that culminated in the performance of her piece A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America. We have also hosted Yale’s own highly respected faculty who work in this area including Alan Trachtenburg, Laura Wexler, Alexander Nemerov, and Hazel Carby. Former PMW members are now out spreading the word at Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, Bard, and Boston University.

In 2005, PMW members past and present came together in Durham, England for the conference Thinking Photography—Again, hosted by the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at the University of Durham. There, members presented a roundtable titled Photography and Memory: Relearning the Critical Alphabet, which culminated in the production of the limited-edition artist’s book The Alphabet Manifesto. For The Alphabet Manifesto, members took one or two alphabet letters each and ruminated on such topics as daguerreotypes, war, gender, history, and fiction. A copy of this book is now deposited in the Beinecke and in the Goldsmith Library in London.

Many of the events listed above could not have occurred without the generous support of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the spring of 2008, the Beinecke will once again sponsor a major PMW event, the graduate student conference Photographic Proofs with keynote speaker John Tagg.