The Implicit Caption

Photographs never “speak for themselves”; they are mute objects which require viewers to give them any kind of voice.  When they are viewed, meanings about their existence, intentionality, and content are formed through the eyes of the beholder – who may or may not know anything about the historical context of the image.  Public knowledge of the past is so embedded in modern visual technologies, that it has become imperative for historians to be aware of where, when and how photographs are produced, circulated, and remembered.  Photographs cannot be mere illustrations or be left to offer “the sense of the past”, when they also serve as historical evidence – evidence, which historians ought to hold to the same rigorous standards as any other source.  But when photographs are deployed in historical narratives as illustrations of the past, historians typically fail to caption them with either provenance and copyright, or with description – either because they assume that the accompanying text has sufficiently contextualized the image, or because they implicitly count on the reader to “read” images as virtual, parallel texts which are inherently legible.  This presentation will explore the ways that implicit captions appear in historical narratives, and suggest why historians need to become more responsible for articulating the photograph’s properties, provenance and circulation history as well as meanings conveyed by images, with reference to the work of critics such as Georges Didi-Huberman, Janina Struk and Marianne Hirsch.