Presentation by Stefan Schutt at Narrative Network Australia Conference: Losing the Plot (July 2010). Covers specific aspects of investigation related to the Small Histories PhD project.

1. The murky business of recorded memories: Context, framing and working with autobiographical material Stefan Schutt

11. more roads and nodes…. The important thing is the creation of the links between the nodes How you see the node (or photo, or piece of writing, or sound) will depend on how you have approached it, on the context your journey has created for it . Jonathon Potter (1996); Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction ” Truth can be treated as a commodity which is worked up, can fluctuate, and can be strengthened or weakened by various procedures of representation. "(p5) "Histories cannot be produced without drawing on the techniques of narrative and character construction which are so developed in the fictional domain" (p94)

14. context and framing: context Photos from those years have a different intensity; it's not because they record a lost world, and not because they are a kind of witnessing - that is the work of any photograph. No. It's because from 1940 it was illegal for any Pole, let alone a Polish Jew, to use a camera. So any photo taken by a Pole from that time and place is a forbidden photo - whether of a public execution or of a woman reading a novel quietly in her bed. The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels, p. 286

17. context and framing: context

22. context and framing: framing

23. context and framing: framing ‘ ...after my first researches I started to see these photographs with a different eye. My grandparents' romantic wedding photos, which I used to admire so much, had lost their innocence. Only now did I notice the Party badge on Ernst's lapel. Heinrich, his best man, posed outside the registry office with the happy couple. He was wearing his SS uniform...’ (Himmler, p 19)

25. the end. [email_address] www.smallhistories.com