Introduction

This chapter explores the use of images from local history archives in the co-construction of short individual films with people with dementia. The study on which the chapter is based was carried out with two men and eight women living in a housing-with-care facility in the northern UK. Although we did not set out to draw on archive images, we found that they quickly took on a central role in the film narratives of several of the participants. In the process, the archive materials themselves were also transformed, memorialising the everyday spaces and places in which the participants had lived. In this study, archive images were often used to elicit memories of people, or places that no longer look the same in the present day. We found that such images were often more recognisable to the participants than were contemporary photographs. This corresponds with research into the ‘reminiscence bump’ (Thomsen and Bernsten, 2008), which suggests that autobiographical memory for the period between about five and 30 years of age remains well preserved in people living with dementia.

The archive images we used stood in for a past that was simultaneously personal and shared with others who had grown up and come of age in the same geographical area. Using such images often helped to establish the accuracy of historical accounts offered by people with dementia, who are prone to being unheard or disbelieved. The films work to trouble binary distinctions between the personal and the social, remembering and forgetting. They also historicise the experience of those men and women who now live with dementia.

Many of the co-created films, therefore, have a dual role, both as personal life story narrative and as visual folklore. The latter term has traditionally been used by anthropologists to refer to the nonprofessional use of popular imagery, artefacts, implements and icons to create and perpetuate group identity (Goodman et al, 2005). In recent studies, visual anthropologists have turned increasingly to the role played by photography and film in folklore and popular culture (Joubert, 2004). In the work discussed below, we found that using archive images helped to re-connect the participants with a sense of community and cultural history.