Still Pictures happens to be the first book by Janet Malcolm that I read and also the last she wrote before her death in mid-2021 (the book is posthumously published). The first half of the book forms something akin to a memoir (or an autobiography, although Janet herself doesn’t seem to like the term). Instead of chronicling her life into chapters reflecting various stages of her life, Janet starts each chapter with photos and follows the photos with background stories about what they are about, who are the people inside those photos, and the relevance of the photos to her life. Janet’s distrust of autobiography as a form is very telling, coming from a journalist cum photographer who was used to the idea of describing other people’s experiences, having been a kind of amanuensis. She writes that memory is not a journalist’s tool, does not narrate or render character, has no regard for the reader. ‘If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious,’ she continues.

Her description of memory also triggers more questions with regard to photography, which could be said as a tool to assist us in retaining our memories (or even in these days and age, to manipulate memories). ‘Photography is naively believed to reproduce visual actuality, but in fact the images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same. Taking a picture is a transformative act,’ she describes. It goes without saying that photography is not the same as reproducing the actuality.

Janet’s view reminds me of Susan Sontag’s view in On Photographyas she explores the moral and ethical implications of photography. ‘To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.’ The actuality is being filtered, sometimes to serve the purpose of the person behind the camera lens, or unintentionally, which perhaps Janet’s distrust of autobiography seems to be about.

But autobiography is something personal, and Janet could be very frank and subjective in her descriptions of the people inside the photos. Her stories begin with the experience of her family emigrating from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1939, just a month before Hitler launched the Second World War, to the experience of growing up in her adoptive country as part of Czech-Jewish émigrés. As an émigré, her upbringing undoubtedly shaped her understanding of memory and identity. The experience of being uprooted from one's homeland and growing up in a foreign country creates a rich tapestry of emotions and reflections, which she artfully incorporates into her exploration of photography and memory.

She also frequently employs psychoanalysis, turning to Sigmund Freud, as she analyses the happenings in her own life. Janet draws parallels between the elusive nature of memory and photography. She reflects on how both media are inherently fragmented, selective, and subject to the passage of time. Janet brilliantly connects this aspect of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis, which emphasises the role of the unconscious mind in shaping our memories and perceptions. By doing so, she offers a profound understanding of how memory is not a mere recollection of objective events but a complex interplay of conscious and unconscious forces.

Throughout the book, Janet engages with the idea of memory as a construct rather than an accurate record of the past. Her analysis of how photographs can create false memories or evoke feelings of nostalgia and longing echoes Freud's theories on the reconstruction of memory. By intertwining Freudian concepts with personal anecdotes and astute observations, Janet adeptly illuminates the intricacies of the human mind and its connection to photography. One of the book's strengths lies in Janet’s ability to synthesise her personal history, Freudian psychoanalysis, and her profound knowledge of photography, which forms an interesting memoir cum essays (although it would be hard to describe it as an autobiography).

A quick memoir with short chapters that use an old photograph as a starting point. Mostly childhood memories about family and friends amongst the Czech immigrant communities in New York City. A lovely read with nice insights into family and memory.

Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures On Photography and Memory, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

I appreciate NetGalley having provided this uncorrected proof for me to read and review. I am so glad that they approved my request.

Years ago Barbara Pym said of her novels:

I might use Christopher Isherwood’s phrase ‘I am a camera’ to describe the process by which the novelist records his impression of life. But the novelist’s camera is a selective one, picking and choosing, recording some things clearly, rejecting others altogether. And it is obvious that the camera of one novelist may record quite different things from that of another.

Janet Malcolm acknowledges that the same process has influenced her autobiography, that of a nonfiction writer, combining photographs and text. In both cases the reader is left with an exciting journey – that of the information on the page, and that of interpretation. Malcolm’s work is introduced by Ian Frazier, a friend of twelve years, who spoke with her shortly before she died. Anne Malcolm, her daughter, wrote the afterword. Both make important contributions to the text, without undermining Janet Malcolm’s own interpretation of her life, in this book, through photographs. These are a mixture of beautifully rendered pieces; reproductions which while poor, still tell a story; depictions of facets of Malcolm’s life; and photographs of others’ lives through which their story and glimpses of Malcolm’s, are woven. A short note about the author provides one story of this captivating author; Malcolm’s own text and choice of photographs tells another; yet another can be glimpsed at times through interpreting the photos; and most importantly, Malcolm abandoned her attempt to write a formal autobiography which she found unrewarding, and has used photos of events and people, from which she emerges in glimpses as well as with a full story. The whole is an engrossing read in short pieces associated with a photograph.

The first photographs, which juxtapose that of a Janet as a small child, in a pose that reflects the one of a man in his sixties, is written about as if Malcolm is outside the child and what she refers to as an incongruous assertive pose. Malcolm then moves into her first memory of her life, a festival of girls in traditionally poses. A picture that Malcolm wanted to join. And then she gets to the subject of the title of this piece – Roses and Peonies.

A handwritten note on the back of the second photo is ominous – ‘Leaving Prague, July 1939’. But then we are alerted to the expression on the child’s face in almost an amusing aside: she is grumpy (and variations of this description) while her parents are smiling. Malcolm’s Czech theme is introduced, and the family’s move to America. And for Malcolm it was a move, a fortunate one, rather than in their understanding, an escape. The subtlety of the words and photograph are so indicative of what is to come. Stories that are so restrained at times, stories that open a realm of interpretation and understanding of events and at other times so strong in language and opinion that they are almost offensive.

Reading Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures On Photography and Memory is an amazing journey, one that makes me regret not having read her previous work. I am grateful to have been given this opportunity by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley.

Reading this book made me want to read all of her writing. To know even more about her. Why it was so hard for her to write about herself yet so easy to capture others’ stories. She said: “I cannot write about myself as I wrote about the people I have written about as a journalist.” I disagree. Janet Malcolm’s life was fascinating. Having begun to catalog images of her youth after she and her family fled the Nazis and headed to New York, STILL PICTURES: ON PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEMORY is a collection of essays, published posthumously, about her life as a refugee in a new country, family and friends. A memoir Malcolm never intended to write, but I’m glad it’s here.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

A life chronicled through family photos. More a series of essays than a sustained autobiography or memoir, it’s a series of short biographical essays each one inspired by an old snapshot. The book is fragmentary, a self-reflective collection of reminiscences and recollections, published posthumously and an evocative and engaging glimpse into Janet Malcolm’s life and work. I was gripped by it, and found it a revealing and fascinating insight into her past and family history.

Janet Malcolm, a long-time writer for the New Yorker, has written an unusual memoir. Instead of following a traditional chronological recollection of life (boring and tedious thing to do in her opinion), she built the book as a collection of essays that look at old photographs from her family archive. Her childhood, her parents, people who were part of her life, people who passed through it, Italian plate. Even though we look at the photographs, when you read her book, watercolors come to mind. Janet Malcolm said in the book, "I would rather flunk a writing test than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart. The prerogative of cowardly withholding is precious to the most apparently self-revealing of writers.. I apologetically exercise it here." It is a quiet book, but her words stay with you.

Still Pictures is late Janet Malcolm's autobiography, carefully curated by her daughter. It contains fragments of Malcolm's and her family's life as a Czech family moving to post-war America, in writing and photographs. I've always adored Janet Malcolm and this was a delight to read. Thank you Netgalley and FSG for the opportunity to read Still Pictures!

3.5 rounded down

Janet Malcolm - journalist and author of a number of non-fiction books including The Journalist and the Murderer - has written a memoir in fragments and reflections, with each chapter taking a photo from her life as a starting point. This is a particularly fitting format given that her journalistic career began as photography critic for the New Yorker - turns out she was a keen photographer herself as well and published a book of her own photographs (Burdock).

My main criticism is that the book was a bit fragmentary, with large chunks of Malcolm's life not included. I think perhaps if you go into this expecting to learn a fair bit about her younger years and the biographies of parents and other older relatives (rather than Malcolm herself) then you might be less disappointed than I was. Still a worthwhile read, and the afterword by Malcolm's daughter was great.

This book is a beautifully written memoir of sorts through a series of snapshots and writings that now have been published posthumously and curated by her daughter. Malcolm was known as a journalist who wrote about others and now so to speak the camera and pen are turned on her. The result is a series of fragments and memories of her childhood, growing up and becoming an adult, and her career. She became particularly known when she was sued by one of her subjects (Jeffrey Masson) claiming she fabricated conversations with him. Her descriptions of having to testify (in two separate trials) is really compelling to read. In a sense, journalism was put on trial in terms of the balance between the ability to take some poetic license where conversations were held vs. soberly just reporting like it's a court transcription "just the facts no sprucing up with other details or embellishments." I can only think how boring that would be to read. What is particularly interesting is that Janet Malcolm felt that it was difficult to write about oneself because there is a push to make you seem like an interesting person. But in the end she is successful with this book because she not only is self-reflective and examines her relationship with her mother and societal contexts and expectations for women throughout the decades. A quick and beautiful read. I recommend it.
Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I came across the writing of Janet Malcolm a long time ago, when I found her book: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. What fascinated me about Malcolm's approach to a subject that there were already far too many books about, was how fresh it felt and what an interesting angle she took. It was as much about the difficulties for a biographer in writing about someone else's life as anything else. It was personal, it was profound. It was original. And that's what I found in this book, too. This is a series of curated snapshots from Malcolm's archive, each accompanied by her thoughts on it and a delve into the past. It's not chronological. Not all the pictures are brilliant. Some are completely unilluminating. It's what they spark in Malcolm that is the joy of this book. It's wonderful. My only criticism is that it is too short.

Janet Malcolm shares with us bits an d pieces of her life .She shares her childhood her coming to America with her family.She writes of their adjustment to the country the language the day to day living.Each essay autobiographical so many events in her life and career.#netgalley #fsg

"The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. the few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories."

Janet Malcom chronicles her life story through reflections on a series of photographs, through which we learn about the experience of Czech families living in post-war America, families who narrowly escaped being obliterated by the Holocaust. The family mostly in question is her own. The strongest parts of this memoir (though Malcom states her issues with the title "autobiography") are when she writes about her mother, father, sister and closest friends. She poses questions she will never have answers to, among them being the funny issue of how memories are made, stored and altered over time. I loved this aspect of her research with this book. When we look at ourself in an old photograph and we can't place a memory associated to this image, how are we to build the history of our own story? An old snapshot of our father, in unrecognizable clothing, can lure us in to ask, "Who really was this man I know to be my father?" I loved Malcom's inquisitiveness and occasional demand to withhold information from the reader.

I found the sections of the book that delved into more removed characters from the center of her life less interesting and at times took me on tangents that lost my attention. Additionally, perhaps it is a matter of taste, but sometimes I felt the prose was detached and cold to a fault.

The use of language, translation, dissection of specific, untranslated-able Czech words add depth to the reading experience and inform our picture of a person caught between two cultures, two languages.

Overall I enjoyed many aspects of this book however it may be stronger for those readers who are more familiar with her journalistic work and have an affinity already for her voice.

As someone who once wrote “I have never found anything any artist has said about his work interesting,” Janet Malcolm, in her latest (posthumously published) book “Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory”, accordingly says little about her work but a great deal about her life. Seen through the unforgiving lens of the camera and the unreliable eye of memory, veracity is, as she herself admits, arbitrary.

That Malcolm, so incisive a portraitist in words, should turn again to the camera as a conceptual device isn’t surprising. Photography as an art form has long beguiled her. As a staff writer for The New Yorker, she wrote for many years on art and interior design. Her first book, published in 1980 was “Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography” A subsequent book “Forty One False Starts” included essays on photography and photographers. In writing about Thomas Struth, she says “photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.”

Inescapable truthfulness is, of course, a trademark of the Malcolm style. As for the camera, it may not lie but it can conceal – move the frame slightly, change the angle, adjust the focus and what you see may be either less or more than the truth. Likewise, in her memoir, Malcolm’s disclosures may not be more than the truth, but they are redacted. We are given fragments of the life seen from angles.

For a writer who had a reputation as “a formidable interviewer and a ferocious portraitist” Malcolm was very diffident when it came to writing about herself. “I would rather flunk a writing test,” she said, "than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.”

Writing of an abandoned attempt at autobiography in 2010 in The New York Review of Books she said the journalist who tries to write an autobiography "has more of an uphill fight than other practitioners of the genre". The unsparing, rational "I" of journalism must be discarded in favour of the softer, more indulgent "I" of autobiography, one who tells their story "as a mother might ... with tenderness and pity, empathising with its sorrows and allowing for its sins." Judging herself a failure at this she says, "Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection”.

There is no such failure here, either of interest or affection. Wry admissions of youthful callousness notwithstanding, there’s a softness in the “I” of this memoir. Of the photos, many of which she found in a box in her apartment, she is less forgiving, at least at first glance, judging them gray and uninteresting and comparing them to “barely flickering dreams that dissipate as we awaken”. But, on closer examination, “the drab little photographs” begin to speak to her.

They speak of people and relationships and the unfolding of a young child's formative years within the immediate circle of family and the larger crucible of tumultuous world events. Like the collages she enjoyed creating in later life, these assembled photographs are ephemeral in nature, small sketches that suggest a greater theme.

In the observations provoked by the photographs, it’s the woman rather than the writer who steps from the frame. Despite her reputation as a formidable journalist, her take no prisoners approach to interview subjects and her skewering of fakery in all its forms, the self-portrait we see here is relatable and engaging. Humour, a droll self-deprecation, warmth and a kinder acceptance of the frailties of herself and others round off the sharp edges of the public portrait.

We’re first introduced to the author as a toddler, aged two or three, sitting on a doorstep, dressed in a sunsuit and hat, hands on knees, grinning, as if at something funny someone’s said to her. To the adult Malcolm, this child is unrecognisable. A few years later we see a young girl aged nearly five looking out with her parents from the window of a train taking them from Prague to Hamburg. Again, Malcolm has no memory of being that girl. Or of knowing they were to board a ship taking them to a new life in New York. It’s only in hindsight she learns the momentous nature of the journey, that they were fleeing Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis because they were Jewish. Like a curtain unfurling, the unrecognisable slowly appears, takes on meaning and allows the interpretation of what meant little to the child at the time - her family’s national and racial identity, their assimilation into a new country and how she and her sister’s imaginative lives were inexorably shaped by those experiences.

This collection was composed of various pieces she wrote at different times, never intending them to form a memoir or autobiography, but rather seeing them as improvisations, explorations of the close interrelationship between the visual and the written. Fragmentary though this approach might suggest, it coheres as memoir, notwithstanding her statement that ”memory speaks only some of its lines”. With characteristic elegance, she rationalises the incompleteness of the final result – “most of what happens to us goes unremembered. The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.”

Incomplete they may be, but these glimpses into the life and career of a legendary writer will become as deservedly acclaimed as her other works. Like photography itself, the significance lies in what’s revealed. As Ian Frazier (a close friend) says in his introduction to the book “she wrote these pieces at a level of wisdom that took a lifetime to attain, and that almost nobody reaches at any age.”

Janet Malcolm’s book was of special interest to me, as in an extraordinary reversal of circumstances, I once interviewed her. This happened a few years ago in New York at an unmemorable restaurant on Broadway on a wintry Sunday afternoon. To say it was an occasion that immediately went into the developing solution of my memory is a huge understatement, as I’ll never forget it. Well may you ask what I, a modest uncelebrated scribbler from little old Adelaide, was doing in New York but more to the point, sitting across a table from one of the literary lions of our age.

Here's how it happened.

In the embryonic stages of the book I was trying to write, I’d somehow convinced a government arts funding body it would be a worthy act to finance me on a research trip to the US and Paris. My powers of persuasion proved greater than my powers of getting the book published as it’s turned out, but we won’t go there. Janet Malcolm’s remarkable book “Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude”, had become a cornerstone of my reading on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, the putative subjects of my putative book. Janet Malcolm, I knew, lived in New York and so it was but a small step to email her and request an interview. (One of the dubious benefits of email is it makes it all too easy to practice the nothing ventured nothing gained approach).

That she not only replied but agreed to give up her time to an unknown, unpublished and unproven Australian writer seemed to me evidence that miracles happen. More to the point, it was evidence of her remarkable generosity, openness and graciousness.

Lacking photographs, here are the assembled fragments of memory:

I arrived late in a sweating, red faced panic after the cab somehow got lost between my hotel and the restaurant. She waited.

In a fluster of fumbling for my notebook, I dropped everything out of my handbag onto the floor. She pretended it didn’t happen.

I said it was hard to hear above the music. She asked a waitress to turn it off.

I said it was hard to write about legends like Stein and Toklas. She asked ,with a cheeky smile, if I was going to mention Toklas’s moustache.

I apologised for sniffing (I had a cold). She said she had one too.

On parting, I started babbling about how grateful, how appreciative, how lovely … etc. etc. She said when I had a draft, send it and she’d show it to her editor. (Cue to slashing wrists because I still don’t have a decent draft and now I don’t have her.) One of the pathetic secrets of my heart.

PS: I still have the emails we exchanged – faded photos of a different kind.

Thank you to Farrar Straus & Giroux for giving me an advance review copy of the book.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. The author, who spent her entire life reporting on others, tells a bit about herself, using a series of photographs as a jumping off point. Some of the later chapters deal with her libel lawsuit and her husband’s experience during World War 2, but the majority of her book deals with her family’s escape from Prague and her family’s early life on the east side of Manhattan among a group of Czechoslovakian emigres. An affectionate, and sharp eyed, look back on a writer’s early life and the family that helped shape her.

It's a treat to have another bite of Janet Malcolm's unique apple: STILL LIFE lacks perhaps the tartness of Malcolm's brilliant biographies, but its autobiographical tone remains uniquely hers. Fragmentary yet incisive (and insightful), this volume sits comfortably beside the late author's masterworks.

Many thanks to FSG and Netgalley for the pleasure of the read.

A last despatch from the great...well, biographer is hardly the word. Biographer of biographies, maybe? The woman who'd map the thickets that had grown up around a reputation over the years, who made a career out of giving her subjects enough rope. Indeed, the final chapters here go full 'needless to say, I had the last laugh' regarding one person she wrote about who had the temerity to sue, and the fortuitous mistrial which gave Malcolm a chance to drop her New Yorker (as in the magazine) persona and show him the error of his ways. She also admits to an absolutely brilliant prank on two generations of photography students. But these chapters are the exception; for the most part this is a book in which someone nearing the end of a long life sets down fragmentary memories of a lost childhood, simply so that some echo of those moments would be preserved once she herself was no longer around to remember them. And it was an eventful life; I had no idea that her family were Czech Jews who'd narrowly escaped the Holocaust, and it seems to be only while writing this that Malcolm herself realised, for instance, that having thought of her parents as permanent exiles, in fact they spent most of their life in America. Where they became more respectable figures than the bohemian (in both senses) young couple who'd partied with Karel Capek. Although, of course, many couples change like that once they have kids, even without one of history's great monsters chasing them from Mitteleuropa to the USA. The framing device is a series of photographs, each sparking memories – much like Jarvis Cocker's recent memoir in objects, as it happens, though the mood here is considerably more elegiac. She is, of course, still Janet Malcolm to the end, keenly aware that this account must be as incomplete and partial as any she ever picked at, if not more so. But there's a fondness here, a desire to somehow fix happy moments from long ago, that weighs heavier: "My mind is filled with lovely plotless memories of him. The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography, which gives it its vitality if not its raison d'etre. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification – and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them. "Who asked you to tarnish my image with your miserable little hurts?" the dead person might reasonably ask." So there's just enough of that sin here to stop things getting sappy in a way Malcolm would never have allowed herself, but the dominant mood is a great sorrow at all the little joys lost to Time, all the now-insoluble mysteries we might have solved if only we'd thought to ask in time: "We are each of us an endangered species. When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will ever exist again. The lives of great artists and thinkers and statesmen are like the lives of the great extinct species, the tyrannosaurs and stegosaurs, while the lives of the obscure can be likened to extinct species of beetles. Daddy would probably not find this conceit of great interest. He moved along his own trail. He liked to pick and identify certain small, frail, white wildflowers that it never occurred to me to notice, and that he never forced on my attention."

(Netgalley ARC)