Doing History with and of Photographs

Photographs offer historians a “double testimony” -- they show us frozen fragments of past scenes and they tell us about the authors who made them -- hence, two distinct research approaches are required. This presentation will examine what I consider to be the poles of incorporating photographs into the historical enterprise: photohistory and histories of photography. Photohistories rely on the “transparency” of the medium to construct narratives about the past. At their best, they examine the bits of data produced by mechanical reproduction that embalm aspects of material existence, daily life, and social relations, often incorporating people left out of written documents such as women and children. At their worst, photohistories feature Great Men, and are little more than political-military chronicles (a good example are the huge series of picture histories produced by the Casasola Archive in Mexico). Histories of photography analyze photographs as metaphors or symbols that inform us about imagemakers’ ways of representing; if interrogated properly, they can reveal the worldviews that are expressions of the mentalities embodied by the photographers (and the media in which they publish), which have been created by the contexts in which they exist. This form of historicizing will require a wide variety of methodologies designed to study the enormous varieties of photography, such as journalistic, artistic, industrial, commercial, organizational, imperial, and subaltern, as well as that produced within family situations.