Listening to Photographs: Family, Motherhood, and Grief in Lebanese-Armenian Homes

Abstract

This thesis examines photographs as mnemonic devices and affective objects in the homes of Lebanese-Armenian mothers. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews with five Lebanese-Armenian women living in Bourj Hammoud, it considers their practices of collecting, inheriting, preserving, storing, and displaying family photographs. By listening to these speak about these cherished visual artifacts, I show how family photographs mediate memory, but also how speech about them illuminates these women’s experiences of kinship, motherhood, and grief.

Existing literature has shown that women, and mothers specifically, play a key role in the transmission of communal histories and their continuity across generations. While the thesis set out to explore the transmission of the memory of the Armenian genocide through photographic family archives, conversations with my interlocutors revealed the many layers of personal memory and identity that imbue the hidden and displayed photographs in Lebanese-Armenian homes. More than the preservation of public histories of violence, this thesis shows how family photographs are affective objects that activate women’s memories of filial love, loss, and grief. Photographs, I argue, have much to tell us about motherhood as both an experience and an identity within Lebanese-Armenian families.

Focusing on these mother’s photographic practices within the domestic sphere, the study mobilizes listening as a methodological approach in order to understand what lies behind the construction of the ideal image of the family within family photographs. These mothers’ selection and engagement with five family photographs reveal how the latter become “sticky objects,” circulating and accumulating affect over time.

By focusing on listening to rather than looking at photographs, I refrain from visually reproducing these visual artifacts out of respect for my interlocutors’ privacy. What matters, here, is less about what the photographs show. Rather, listening to photographs brings out the stories, memories, and emotions embedded in them through these mothers’ accounts and narrations.