Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age

Abstract

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 What does a historian need to know to interpret a photograph as a historical document?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? 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indirectly raise the issue of whether one must understand the photographer's intent in order to interpret an image as a historical document.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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