Annette Kuhn is Professor of Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and an editor of the journal Screen. She has written about photographs in The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (1985) and Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995). Her most recent book is An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002).

As a visual medium, the photograph has many culturally resonant properties that it shares with no other medium. These essays develop innovative cultural strategies for reading, re-reading and re-using photographs, as well as for (re)creating photographs and other artworks and evoke varied sites of memory in contemporary landscapes: from sites of war and other violence through the lost places of indigenous peoples to the once-familiar everyday places of home, family, neighborhood and community. Paying close attention to the settings in which such photographs are made and used--family collections, public archives, museums, newspapers, art galleries--the contributors consider how meanings in photographs may be shifted, challenged and renewed over time and for different purposes--from historical inquiry to quests for personal, familial, ethnic and national identity.