Photographs and the Practice of History

A Short Primer

Elizabeth Edwards

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350120679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new approach to historical thinking which explores these questions and redefines the practices at the heart of this discipline. Structured around key concepts in historical methodology which are recognisable to all undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our historical frameworks even when research is textually-based. Conceptualised as a series of 'sensibilities' rather than a methodology as such, it is intended as a companion to 'how to' approaches to visual research and visual sources. Photographs and the Practice of History not only builds on existing literature by leading scholars: it also offers a highly original approach to historiographical thinking that gives readers a foundation on which to build their own historical practices.

1

Inscription

The possibility of history is bound to the survival of traces of what is past and our ability to read these traces as traces.¹

History is grounded in, and shaped by, the inscriptions and traces that reach us from the past. They are the historians’ bedrock of evidence – facts, instances, traces – which are assiduously gathered and interpreted as narratives are forged. Historical thinking begins with inscription – a working out with and through sources, that ability to read ‘traces as traces’. Although there are shifts in emphasis that go with shifts in historical focus and method, inscriptions of one sort or another, those surviving things and surfaces, are the materials, tools and practices of their trade, the historian’s skill. It was ever thus. If ideas of discourse, narrative and rhetoric have, over recent decades, reformulated historical practice, within the broad historical academy there remains, at base, a model of the primacy of the document, that is, inscriptive knowledge. The postmodern debate about the epistemes of representation and the possibility of ‘the real’ has also made the critical status, theorization and interpretation of inscription fundamental to its interrogation.

In this chapter I am going to consider the impact of photographs as inscriptions, that is something laid down by marks on a surface, in this case by technical processes. After all, the very word ‘photography’ means drawing, making lines, with light. We’ll come back to that. Inscription implies a desire for permanence, a setting down, a chance of longevity. It refers to that which is inscribed on a surface – parchment, paper, stone, clay – or chemical, and now pixels. Such inscriptions involve a huge range of, first, actions - writing, typing, printing, painting, carving, photographing, and, second, forms – letters, charters, etchings, books, lantern slides. The list is very extensive, and I will return to aspects of these forms when I consider materiality in Chapter 7, but inscription is an element in the material world, and an indispensable way in which the past is projected into the future. History is, we could say, constituted by the past of human life quietly contained, stored and transported through inscriptions. Photographs are integral to these fundamental practices, because not only do they inscribed past moments on surfaces but they massively extend the idea of what historical inscriptions might be. They disturb the surface of the documentation of the past.

Inscriptions are ‘wilful marks’ that ‘fix’ action and, with them, meanings of particular social actions: they make durable and suggest significance and visibility. Moreover, inscription, and indeed its survival, suggests a certain intention or agency. For example, the unmistakable desire to record that is implied by the carefully filed court record or diplomatic exchange. Conversely, other inscriptions are of fleeting usage and accidental survival – laundry lists or bills of account. Both are the stuff of history, both are inscriptions even if they work differently. This applies even to some non-human inscriptions – CCTV, speed cameras or NASA visualizations of space, because they are equally the result of human agency and are inscriptive in different ways.

Photographs are, of course, filtered through the view of the photographer. With many photographs one can ascribe an intention to the making of the image, while some remain more opaque. I discuss this more in Chapter 6 on context, but we need to be aware of two crucial points as they relate to inscription: first, that historical actors did not have coherent or consistent views; rather they drew on a multiplicity of attitudes, skills and positions. So, we have to be careful in how we address inscriptive intention. Second, even more important at this point (and central to those inscriptive marks on surfaces), is that what the camera inscribes far exceeds the intentions of the photographer. With the possible exceptions of highly controlled forms such as art photography and advertising photography, the random inclusivity of photographic inscription exceeds intention, a key point to which I shall return, but a crucial one in the consideration of the kind of historiographical disturbances photographs might engender. Of course, one can make this claim for any historical inscription up to a point: they always reveal more than they inscribe. They are also loquacious in their absences and their suggestions of what was not inscribed; this is the stuff of basic source criticism. But photographs introduce an entirely new form of inscription into the historical landscape, and an unruly one at that.

Like history itself, photographs are citational, in that their inscriptions quote and reference the past – what has been. However, photographs offer more than inscription. They are traces. This puts a very different complexion on their historiographical activity and impact. The inscriptive trace of photographs is created by light reflected off the physical world and imprinting itself on a chemical receptor carried on a support, usually, glass or film, although paper was used in the early period, significantly here, sensitized writing paper. This is their unique historical quality. Unless one includes the less encompassing documenting forms of plaster-cast and death masks, for instance, or even the somewhat dubious Veil[s] of St Veronica (one meaning of which is ‘true image’) and the Turin shroud, no other historical source provides such directness, nor are other sources premised so insistently on the primacy of its inscribed and marked surfaces. Photographs offer an inscription that, as early practitioners and advocates of photography in 1830s and 1840s claimed, was traced by nature itself through the action of light. It inscribed and held, in apparent entirety, the transitory as it became past. This inscription of the physical world, and claims made upon it, was also guaranteed by known mechanical and technical parameters of photographic cameras as inscribing machines. They brought together inscription, a sense of authenticity and a sense of witnessing. Although historical sources are often referred to metaphorically as traces, traces of past lives, photographs bring a new level of consciousness and imagination to the idea of trace. So we have to ask what these specific forms of inscription and tracing bring to the practice of history and their implications?

This is not, of course, unproblematic and there is a sizable literature exploring, for instance, the semiotic, political, ideological and ethical aspects of photographs, and their manipulation, ratios of truth, or on representation and its production. We can tie ourselves in theoretical knots about the nature and causality of the photographic ‘index’ (a term borrowed from linguistic semiotics), about what the trace is ‘of’, how it might relate to the physical world, and how it might signify. Is it representation, replica or resemblance, or what are the workings of traces as signs, icons or symbols? Photographs’ action over these categories has been well-argued and convincing, to a greater or lesser extent. For example, there is, on the one hand, a very substantial body of critical theory around power, ideology and representation that has argued why such claims to the real cannot or should not be so. On the other hand, there are historians worried about the way in which photographs can unintentionally, or indeed intentionally, manipulate – that is they are ambivalent inscriptions at the best of times. I mark these debates here, only because they recur continuously in the literature and hover in the background of this discussion. However, I am leaving this huge photographic literature largely aside, because my concern is what happens at the intersection of photographs and historical practice, where effectiveness and historiographical impact is as important as ontology, though as we’ll see, the two are entangled. Whatever the nuances, they come down to the essential question for historians, how photographs inscribe the real and to what effect. At the end of the day, if photographs are inscriptions, they are also, like all other historical sources, acts of translation mediating between object and subject, and between worlds ‘out there’ and their understanding and interpretation.

In terms of historical practice, it is useful to stay with the term ‘inscriptions’ (rather than traces or indexes) because it aligns photographs with other predominant sources, and brings photographs’ impact into sharp focus. They are very particular forms of inscription. The desire for, or fantasy of, ‘photographic inscription’, that holds the fleeting moment in order to access past actualities as a historical formation, can be traced back through Western thinking, notably to Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy.² Although the wider conditions of that moment of consolidation are open to debate, photographic registration in the early nineteenth century was effectively a technological rationalization and materialization of a long history of Western metaphysics. Indeed, the very existence of photographs raises a historical question: why does something happen when it does, especially in this case, where some of the science was in place well before the early nineteenth century? Like every other inscriptive form, from Assyrian cuneiform cylinders to type-written documents in government files, photographs carry their own historicity as inscriptions, their own inscriptive modes, which become an essential part of critical approaches to them and their historiographical work. I shall return to these questions in Chapter 6 when I consider the vexed question of that old historiographical war horse – context.

The specific claims of photographs as inscriptions within the historical remit lies in their technology, in their very nature, and many of the other strands I discuss later hinge on the particular inscriptive power to produce a trace that I have just described. The inscriptive connotations of the early cliché and metaphor, ‘the mirror with a memory’ (the early daguerreotype process of the 1840s had a shiny metal surface, like a mirror), are unmistakable, and this has been the photographs’ continuing claim on the historical imagination. The past takes grip and asserts itself through inscriptions, making demands on its historian to read its traces. How much more so with the reality effects of photographs? For all its representational nuances and cultural specificities, and indeed claims to artistic status, photography is essentially a technology of the real. Its validation as historically significant rests on its promises of the visibility and actuality of the past. This is the basis of its claims across multiple and various historical contexts and modalities, for photographs offer both a reach into the past and co-presence. The technical workings of the photographic medium provide its ontological scream: it was there.

There are many caveats around such a statement, entangled with ideas of representation, ideology, intentionality, manipulation and mediation, and ranging from scientific specimen to ‘fake news’, topics which those writing on photographs as historical evidence have unpacked to great effect. The fact remains, however, that photography as an inscriptive technology works in a certain way, whether England or Egypt, Canada or Cambodia, regardless of how the inscriptions themselves are understood, used and the meanings attached to them. One should add that the power of these questions reaches into the digital age, and even form a similar focus for anxiety about inscription. Digital inscription is, like analogue photography, produced by the material action of electro-magnetic radiation as light, through which defines the surface shapes of the physical world. Electronic circuits and screens are materially mediating and as naturalized as glass, film or paper. So while the modes of management and intervention in production of traces and reproduction of images might have changed radically, leaving ‘fake images’ aside for the moment, the essential and formative processes of inscription remain largely, in terms of the physics, not dissimilar.

Various ‘-isms’, such post-structuralism, postmodernism and the new historicism, have reshaped historical narrative and the process of representation over the last four decades, as have the insistent and increasing presence of other historical modalities. These intellectual trends have been equally influential in debates about the discursive regimes of photography, and have undoubtedly had a major impact on history’s relationship with photographs. But it remains that, at one level, photographic inscription seems to align with traditional historiography, in that they appear, as I noted in the Introduction, to have Rankean reach into the past, to tell it as it really or essentially was. Their reality effects accord with the historian’s desire, even fantasy, for direct conduits to the past. Photographs carry expectations too. More than any other historical form they are contingent on the actuality of the past, with a promise that that reflection of light might illuminate human experience sometimes only glimpsed uncertainly beneath textual documents. Photographs also intersect with temporal and spatial spheres, they carry a sense of immediacy and proximity as a representational form, a closing of distance – ‘it was there’. This is integral to referential structure of the historical relationship with photographs, as Roland Barthes famously put it, ‘the there-then-here-now’ that gives a seductive legibility to the past (points to which I shall return in more detail in subsequent chapters).³

These tensions make photographs fluid and ambiguous in ways that perhaps align well with contemporary historiographical concerns, although their potential impact is seldom articulated as such. The excessive and unruly qualities of their inscriptions offer a thickening of historical texture through their inclusive and random inscription. They offer an intensity. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz, many years ago, linked his influential concept of ‘thick description’ to inscription. He remarks that doing ethnography to like trying to make sense of historical inscriptions: ‘foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherences, suspicious emendations and tendentious commentaries’.⁴ Geertz’s notion of ‘thick description’ positions the possibility of cultural (and here historical) understanding in close attention to the significance of detail and particularity, and its piled up and knotted inferences. It is well accepted now that the interchange and interpenetration of sources enables a refigured historiography, and that this has bearing on the inscriptions brought into play – those expansions I noted earlier. Further, it has been suggested that to realize this, historians should start their interrogation at points in documents that appear most opaque. An integrated sense of the efficacy of photographic inscription would appear to offer such a site of historiographical experimentation. Photographs build up inscriptive detail, and offer it, observable, for the kind of historical interpretation on which any re-arrangement of the co-ordinates of past experience and its analysis must depend.

However, inscriptions are not static. They leech out into the shaping of a period or event, so shaping the historical imagination. This is not merely in terms of facts or evidence. Photographs as a presence set an unacknowledged tone or mood to a period. This can apply even to non-photographic periods: how, say, manuscripts or architectural remains are presenced in historical texts. The French historian Bernhard Jussen has demonstrated, for example, how photographic representation of objects (traces) from the Carolingian period in history books sets the ‘tone’ for the interpretation of the period.⁵ The ubiquitous presence and intuitive embrace of photographs in heritage interpretations and histories of the twentieth-century wars are similarly a such case in point. Such intensities and immediacies of inscription are disturbing, because, as I shall discuss in more detail in subsequent chapters, they disrupt the sense of distance and thus a certain objectivity on which historical analysis depends. Yet, as inscriptions, they are a crucial part of the grounding of historical analysis in the hard surfaces of life.

Thus, through different forms and intensities of inscription, the existence of photographs in the historiographical landscape allows historical concepts and historical analysis to refigure. The very nature of photographs tensions their inscriptions between what is intentionally made and what might be accidentally found. This is perhaps another site of disturbance. I have already noted the unruliness of photographs between intention and excess – an aspect of inscription that plays out through all that follows. History, for all its sober demeanour and pursuit of certainty, or at least credibility, is a chancy game, perhaps hanging delicately on ideas of survival, causation and consequence as it builds its accounts. Photographs are especially chancy, despite their seductive appearance of certainty and actuality. They offer an entirely new ball-game in the historical ambivalence stakes. Indeed, that relationship between history and photograph can find a sort of analogy with the idea of ‘trace’ in geometry; that is, something which lies at the boundary of a figure (here history), and which, like photographs, can sit on that boundary and hold a definition of the peripheral. Perhaps this chanciness, this ambiguity, of photographs is reflected in the assiduous attempts by historians to lay down methodologies for ‘reading’ photographs. Bringing photographic inscriptions in line with text is perhaps something of a rear-guard action to contain their potential damage. This too will be a recurrent theme in subsequent chapters.

The existence of photographs could be said then to have a profound, if largely unrecognized, impact on the ways in which historians select their evidence and construct their frames of analysis. Their presence refigures what it is to ‘represent’. All historical acts, textual, visual or oral, and all photographic inscriptions are, of course, acts of representation, they stand for something or somebody. More broadly, photographic inscription, by its very nature, feeds the desire for representational intimacy and sense of connection. Photographs as inscriptions have stimulated a counter-current to the established practices of historical representational distance. They make historical intimacy and connection appear achievable. One is tempted to ask if the experiential turn of so much contemporary history, marked by a concern not simply for what happened, but what it felt like and how it was experienced, can be attributed, though unacknowledged, to the existence of photographs in the historical landscape and their restatement of historical presences.

As I have suggested, the existence of photographs puts pressure on other forms of historical apprehension, and points to new forms of historical excavation, such as Tina Campt’s work on the history of black diaspora experience noted in the last chapter. We are faced with the intensity of the trace that can reshape an understanding of what might constitute a historical source, what is accessible from the past, and how the historian might reasonably respond to such sources. Again, this position puts historiographical pressure even on periods and topics which are resolutely non-photographic – the seventeenth century or even the Middle Ages for instance, because photographic inscription points to the densities of life and experience in the past, the minutiae of the everyday and mundane. While historians have, of course, excavated the mundane from other historical sources and for all periods, the presence of photographs quietly stimulates such a possibility, even if it is not graspable as such; they add just a little weight to imagination, giving it a quasi-photographic dimension. Walter Benjamin said that history is constructed not by stories but from images, and that history ‘decays’ into images and imaginings,⁶ a quasi-photo-montage of dialectical images that reveal new structural forms of its subject matter. Again, this is not a claim to overt causality, but rather points to an effect and atmosph...