"Langford's book joins those few exceptional works, by scholars and writers from Roland Bathes to Pierre Bourdieu to Susan Sontag, which move these meaningful documents into the forefront of communication and cultural studies. Her thesis that these albums contain fundamentally oral mnemonic and symbolic structures is both innovative and insightful." Pauline Greenhill, author ofUndisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada"This is a beautifully written work on photography and memory that at times startles with its poetry. Langford offers new insights into the understanding of visual technology, particularly as it breaks with a dominant scholarly mode that overwhelmingly tends to 'read' photographs as textual instances within a paradigm of visuality." Elizabeth Seaton, Communication Studies, Department of Social Sciences, York University,Ontario "Martha Langford.challenges the usual stress on photography as an exclusively visual medium inSuspended Conversations.Langford is also profoundly aware that a photographic album begins a problematic, second life once it is deposited in an archive.provide[s] preliminaries for an inclusive anthropology of photography that abandons, or downplays, aesthetic judgement.

" David Evans,Source, November 2008.