Prosthetic Memories, Finnish WWII Army Photographs and Online Commemoration

Author(s): Tuuli Matila; Timo Ylimaunu; Paul R. Mullins

Year: 2019

Summary

This is an abstract from the "POSTER Session 2: Linking Historic Documents and Background Research in Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

We will examine Finnish Army photographs from World War Two, that we argue, can shape Finnish views of the war. The photographs have been published in an online gallery, and have mnemonic potential beyond their use in scholarship. Images can be viewed as what Alison Landsberg calls "prosthetic memories", a notion that underlines how various media enable the acquisition of vivid memories of past events, effectively "suturing" viewers into history. This paper examines a series of unsettling images from the Finnish Continuation War (1941-1944) that have been largely ignored but provide especially rich objects to narrate the unexamined dimensions of the conflict.

Cite this Record

Prosthetic Memories, Finnish WWII Army Photographs and Online Commemoration. Tuuli Matila, Timo Ylimaunu, Paul R. Mullins. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, St. Charles, MO. 2019 ( tDAR id: 449183)

Keywords

General
Memory Photography WWII

Geographic Keywords
Finland

Temporal Keywords
20th Century

Spatial Coverage

min long: 19.648; min lat: 59.807 ; max long: 31.582; max lat: 70.089 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 269