Abstract
Historian and theorist Martha Langford has defined the family archive as a "meeting place". This metaphor generates a context for the performance of tactile and sonic registers. As the archive is awakened by the hands that meet photographic materiality and the voices that create narrative frameworks, the "so-called" still and silent photographic form becomes not effectively animated but "affectively" animated. The archive lies at the heart of this investigation as the beholding thread of photography, memory and material culture looks at the vernacular. The vernacular snapshot recorded the everyday, thus constructing a visual and material history. In return this tangible history creates a framework for the haptic and a context for the "affective" experience.