The City Has Changed Them: Storytelling, Memory, and the Family Photo Album

The City has Changed Them: Storytelling, Memory, and the Family Photo Album is an interdisciplinary work that consists of five parts. Four of the parts have an analytical component as well as a personal story to accompany them. Along with the writings there are also seventeen images from one of my family’s photo albums. The purpose of the project is to locate a family through memoir and photos, and trace them through the American phenomenon known as the Great Migration. I used my maternal grandmother, Malqueen Goldsmith, and my father, James Woods, as anchors to the memoir pieces. I outline their departure from the south, their subsequent relocation to New York City, their search for work, interactions within their own communities and the larger social context in which they lived and raised a family from the mid-1940s to roughly 1975. The purpose of the project is for the researcher to view the African American family photo album as a serious historical object. I believe it to be an historical artifact as well as a visual record that warrants the same serious study as traditional historical objects.