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Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age
Martha A. Sandweiss
| The brief essays in this round table collectively explore how photographs can be used to understand the past. Their broad mix of voices—from the archivist and the historian, the photographer and the photographic subject—makes it clear that there is no one way to understand an image. Even a quick reading reveals interpretive tensions: the photographers' intentions clash with the ambitions of the subjects, and both appear at odds with the needs of the viewers, who bring to the image their own experiences and interpretive concerns. Despite their differences, the essays taken together pose two critical questions. What does a historian need to know to interpret a photograph as a historical document? And how stable are images as records of the past? |
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The essays by the photographers Ted Engelmann, David Allen, and Jonathan Hyman indirectly raise the issue of whether one must understand the photographer's intent in order to interpret an image as a historical document. Should it matter to the historian that Engelmann views his photographic work in Vietnam as therapy; that the photojournalist Allen finds his image of an exhausted Oklahoma City rescue worker "heartwarming"; or that Hyman seeks to create an archive of vernacular responses to the events of 9/11? Should it matter that, as Eric Sandweiss argues, the amateur photographer Charles Cushman had "no apparent intended audience" for his fourteen thousand color transparencies of the vernacular American landscape beyond a small circle of intimates? Can one make constructive use of these photographers' images without considering their personal ambitions for their work?1 |
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These essays suggest that understanding a photographer's motivations can help the historian perceive why an image maker makes certain views and not others, how one picture in a large body of work relates to another. But the essays simultaneously suggest how hard it can be to recover photographic intent and how unsteady it remains as a category of analysis. Sandweiss's piece on Cushman, for example, conveys the difficulties of inferring intent from a large body of photographs when one has scant information about the pictures from the photographer. Conversely, Engelmann's essay reveals so much about his personal use of photography "as a way to work through the wounds and scars from the American War in Viet Nam" that one is hard-pressed to interpret his photographs except in that light. But Engelmann's is a rare case. Historians more often confront the difficulties of interpreting images without extensive biographical information on the photographer than those of interpreting pictures in light of the photographer's own readings of them. In either case the historian must be mindful of photographic intent, not because it provides the only way of interpreting an image, but because it provides one possible starting point for a more complicated reading of a picture. The photographer's intent may be fickle, unknowable, beyond the powers of the historian to ascertain. It does not necessarily adhere to the photograph itself in easily discernible ways. But to the extent that every photograph represents a point of view, in the literal as well as the interpretive sense, it is always worth inquiring what it is. One caution, however. The photographer's understanding of his own pictures does not necessarily remain fixed. As David Allen's essay suggests, time and public reaction altered his feeling about his photograph of Anthony "Skip" Fernandez III and his rescue dog, Aspen. The picture may now define Allen's career, but it did not and could not do so when he snapped it. That it now seems so "powerful" to him is a reflection of other viewers' responses over the past twelve years.2 |
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