Between Private and Public

This article is a version of the 2016 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture in which I offered reflections and questions arising from a work in process: the memoir I am writing of my marriage to the historian, Raphael Samuel. Using photography, and in particular, Roland Barthes’s terms ‘studium’ and ‘punctum, coined to evoke the different intensities of experience in looking at photographs, I begin by exploring images of the lonely scholar hero, forging his way into his territory – a rhetorical creation especially inappropriate for Raphael Samuel’s life and work, and at odds, I maintain, with his political notion of a collective or ‘species’ being. More obviously personal photographs from our wedding and honeymoon album also suggest how porous and slippery ‘private’ and ‘public’ are, and how such definitions change historically. Memoir is a capacious and indistinct form – between memory and history: I also briefly consider the ways in which a number of different memoirs, literary, critical and political, represent different ways of ‘being a self in history’. Finally I touch on the fragmentary materials I might use for my own project and try to conjure the changing nature of remembrance and mourning in my own life.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · HERO · Literature · Memoir · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Archaeological Research and Protection · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Undisciplined History

  Open Access•Alison Twells, William G Pooley et al.•History Workshop Journal•2023

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