Over the past decade, historians and sociologists have increasingly used visual materials, in particular photographs, in their work. This volume brings together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and media and visual scholars to articulate how photography, as a practice and as a visual medium, can provide insights into national memory, collective identities, and the historical imagination. This collection allows the reader to trace parallel conceptual developments occurring in the sociology and anthropology of memory and in the history and theory of photography, and to illustrate the unique "angles of vision" these disciplines offer. Photographic images commonly accompany historical accounts, from documentaries to family scrapbooks, and since the early days of commercial photography, pictures have been viewed as tools to capture memories. Later critical writing has challenged this equation by inverting it: photos, along with other archival practices, were often viewed as falling short of their supposed function as vessels of memory and at times even denounced as devices that distorted memories. How does photography participate in the formation and maintenance of collective identities and shared memory discourses, from the family to the nation? Furthermore, how can we begin to conceptualize photography's effects on the historical imagination of individuals and groups? Double Exposure endeavors to answer these questions by calling attention to the variety of contexts in which images circulate and to the narratives from which they spring and which they, in turn, shape. This is the latest volume in Transaction's Memory and Narrative series.

Over the past decade, historians and sociologists have increasingly used visual materials, in particular photographs, in their work. This volume brings together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and media and visual scholars to articulate how photography, as a practice and as a visual medium, can provide insights into national memory, collective identities, and the historical imagination. This collection allows the reader to trace parallel conceptual developments occurring in the sociology and anthropology of memory and in the history and theory of photography, and to illustrate the unique "angles of vision" these disciplines offer.

Photographic images commonly accompany historical accounts, from documentaries to family scrapbooks, and since the early days of commercial photography, pictures have been viewed as tools to capture memories. Later critical writing has challenged this equation by inverting it: photos, along with other archival practices, were often viewed as falling short of their supposed function as vessels of memory and at times even denounced as devices that distorted memories.

How does photography participate in the formation and maintenance of collective identities and shared memory discourses, from the family to the nation? Furthermore, how can we begin to conceptualize photography's effects on the historical imagination of individuals and groups? Double Exposure endeavors to answer these questions by calling attention to the variety of contexts in which images circulate and to the narratives from which they spring and which they, in turn, shape. This is the latest volume in Transaction's Memory and Narrative series.

In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.