Rumors of a tight relationship between photography and memory have been circulating since the nineteenth century, despite the many objections raised in both scholarly and fanciful works. A feature of these attacks is the prosecutor’s reluctance to produce evidence. Roland Barthes writes a long meditation on photography as a form of counter-memory that ultimately rests on a portrait of his mother that he allows no one to see. Siegfried Kracauer launches his skeptical study of photography and memory by evoking a magazine illustration of the “demonic diva,” whose image lures consumers into the memory-vacuum of an eternal present. And who is she? She is “one-twelfth of a dozen Tiller girls,” a bit of figurative fluff. In both cases, and many essays that have followed, we are led by unseen generic images—led, in effect, by our imaginations—to turn our eyes inward and imagine that we are remembering. In Forget Me Not, Geoffrey Batchen does something different: he includes actual photographic images and considers their mnemonic function on the basis of what he—and we—can see. This is a very auspicious beginning to a book that fulfills its promise. Forget Me Not is about expressions of memory in photographic portraits, which Batchen culls...