Picture this!
A Duke History Hub Workshop

“A photograph is a ghost of a moment that has passed—the trace of the light which makes the world visible.  The word ‘photograph’ literally means ‘drawing with light.’  A camera stops time and allows us to witness moments from history—or so it seems." 

-- Richard Salkeld, Reading Photographs: An Introduction to the Theory and Meaning of Images, 2014

This History Hub event brings together historians of the Department who engage with archival photographs from different parts of the world—Brazil, India, the Soviet Union, and the United States—to ask what is at stake in considering the camera as an agent of history through whose lens we view the pasts that travel into our present.  

Deemed a revolutionary technology for recording the world when it first appeared in Europe in the 1830s, photography did not take long to become a global visual practice.  The camera and its products soon transformed the way information came to be gathered, circulated, exhibited, and archived by individuals, institutions, and the modern state.  Photography is also stated to have blurred the distinction between “art” and “science,” and to have inaugurated a fundamental shift in our perception of time, space, and memory. As William Ivins wrote many years ago, “The nineteenth century began by believing that what was reasonable was true and it wound up by believing that what it saw as a photograph of was true—from the finish of a horse race to the nebulae in the sky [1].” 

How and why have we moderns learned to trust what we see in a photograph, and is this trust well-placed?  Does the photograph serve to merely illustrate historical truths we have already extracted from texts and documents—the comfort zone of most historians—or does it actively constitute such truths?  Since the photograph is first and foremost an image, how do we as historians grapple with its aesthetic work even as we make use of it as a “source” and “evidence” for our understandings of the past? Do latest developments in digital image-making technologies also reconstitute our understanding of the role of archival, and primarily analog, photographs? These and many other such critical questions will animate the conversation amongst us, and with you.  While we may not be able to answer these questions, or even agree amongst ourselves on our responses, one thing is for certain: we agree with critics and theorists who propose that “the illiteracy of the future will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography [2].” 

Discover the photographs shared by our panelists here.

Notes:

Opening Quote: Richard Salkeld, Reading Photographs: An Introduction to the Theory and Meaning of Images. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 11.
[1] William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication. New York: Da Copa Press, 1980, p. 94.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography.” In One-Way Street and Other Writings. London: Verso, 1985, p. 256