Who Gets to Stay in the Picture?

Martha Langford on photography, archives, and how visual culture shapes memory, visibility, and the historical record. Event description Photographs do not just preserve the past. They help decide what the past looks like. In this talk, Martha Langford explores how photography and visual archives shape memory, public history, and cultural legitimacy. Images often feel immediate, factual, and emotionally persuasive, but they also reflect decisions about framing, preservation, circulation, and power. Who gets documented? Who stays visible? And who quietly disappears from the record? Drawing on her work in art history and the history of photography, Langford examines how visual culture influences what feels historically real. The result is a richer conversation about archives, representation, and the politics of remembrance, not just what images show, but what they teach us to value and commemorate. This is a talk about photographs, history, memory, and the struggle over what remains in view. What the audience will walk away with • A sharper sense of how photography shapes public memory rather than merely recording it • A clearer understanding of how archives influence visibility, legitimacy, and historical narrative • New ways to think about who remains present in the cultural record and who gets left out • A more critical eye for the relationship between images, history, and power About the speaker Martha Langford, C.M., FRSC, is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Art History at Concordia University. From 2012 to 2025, she served as Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Member of the Order of Canada. Her current major project is the three-volume A History of Photography in Canada, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.