Why Are All Photographs Historical? Photography and Historical Research

This presentation will discuss the historicity of photographs in three senses: as objects of culture, as ways of producing social meaning, and as a means of memory.  As historians, we should must be aware of this holistic perspective when we employ photographs as evidence. We need firstly consider photographs as a cultural objects that reflect the level of technology available, and the knowledge of the author/photographer in relation to the photographic savoir-faire of his or her own time. Secondly, but closely related to the first perspective, we need  to consider the social circuit of photographs, which includes their production and the circulation, as well as their uses and function for a certain society, such as proof, representation, distinction, etc. We must also consider the private and the public uses of photography as an historical attribute of the photographic social production of meaning. Finally, photographs are at the same time historical documents and historical monuments; through them we can access information from the past impossible by other means, but on the other hand, photographs represent a legacy of the self image that past societies preserved for the future, a monumentality that must be considered in a historical analysis. In sum, all photographs are historical not only because they were produced in a certain historical context, but because on them, as a product of human labor, are inscribed the historical conditions of their own production as documents and monuments.

In the presentation these three dimensions of the uses of photograph in historical research will be analyzed through series of photographs composed by the images from different historical social circuits.