Nostalgia in black and white: photography and the geographies of memory

Abstract

In a world of colour, monochrome images break through the monotony of visual saturation, creating a sense of nostalgia in the present. As an aesthetic rooted in the past, black and white photography when applied to the present lends an authority to images by visually coding them as archival. Drawing on photographs taken by young people as part of a broader research project, this short article will explore the tendency of monochrome to elicit geographies of memory by charging them with productive nostalgia. The study, called Engaging Youth in Regional Australia and partly undertaken in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, sought to better understand the connections that regional Australian yout..