Primary Source Assignment 2

historians.org

Seeing Images in History | Perspectives on History

15-19 minutes

Most history textbooks and many academic histories use images to

illustrate the history that they tell. However, when we assign these

books in our classes, we rarely spend time exploring the images in

them, focusing our attention instead on the written content. We do

so because of the way that images are presented in many historical

texts and also because of the way that historians are trained to

view images—as illustrations of written history rather than sources

of history themselves.

In the last few years, partly in response to what has been described

by some as the "visual turn," more historians have been paying

attention to visual images in both their research and teaching.

Although historical texts use still images and these images were the

only mode of visual communication prior to the 20th century, most

books and articles about using media in the classroom focus on

moving images. John O'Connor's AHA publication Teaching History

with Film and Television (1987) and most of the articles published in

Perspectives, for example, concentrate on moving images such as

historical documentaries and narrative films. The following

observations are designed to encourage more extensive use of still

images in the classroom, to help students see the significant ways

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in which images have represented, and have themselves been part

of, historical change. Since these comments consider images as

historical sources, they refer to primary rather than secondary

visual sources.

The Accessibility of the Image

Using images to teach history and discussing this process with

other teachers, I've noticed that visual media often seem more

accessible to our students than the written record. Students

themselves mention that images make the past seem more

accessible, giving concrete shape to a world that sometimes seems

intangible. The learners who arrive in our classrooms today are not

only immersed in technology, but also in visual ways of learning.1

They appreciate the immediacy of the image, which often conveys

information more quickly than a primary document written in

unfamiliar, or even a foreign, language. This immediacy also works

well in discussion sections, where the shared experience of viewing

a picture can provide a focus for lively group discussion. Our

students are often sophisticated readers of visual media and, with

guidance and support, they enjoy the process of viewing and

analyzing historical representations.

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However, visual images are also

inaccessible for the same reasons that they are accessible. The

apparent legibility of the image hides its historical construction, the

ways in which the image was made, distributed, and read at the

time it was produced and since. In my own field of U.S.

immigration, for example, Augustus Sherman's photographs of

diverse immigrants are displayed in the halls of the Ellis Island

immigration museum and illustrate numerous popular histories of

immigration, often suggesting that America has always been a

haven for immigrants (Figure 1).

However, on researching the images, we discover that Sherman

worked for the Immigration Bureau and that his photographs were

used in government reports calling for more immigration

restrictions.2 To strengthen our reading of images, we need to

become better informed about the history and theory of images.

One of our goals in teaching students to use images, therefore,

should be to help them to appreciate the complexity of historical

sources.

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Teaching Images as History

How can we use images to encourage students to learn more about

the complexity of visual culture and historical evidence?

First, and often in contrast to many students' experiences of visual

media from video games to Internet research, we should encourage

our students to slow down. In class, I typically only introduce one or

two (and occasionally a few more) images. The images that I use

most often are illustrations from influential periodicals, including

drawings, photographs, and maps. "Look carefully at the image," I

tell my students. "The more you look, the more you will see." As

they explore the image, their ideas often change. Commenting on

papers that they wrote about political cartoons, students in my

classes have noted that they enjoyed analyzing these primary

sources in detail, "looking below the surface" or "looking deeper

into the image."

Although film and video are exceptionally important visual

resources for teaching history, some teachers have commented to

me about the compellingly different qualities of still images. In a

Teaching American History seminar, some mid-Michigan high

school teachers raised the issue that students often experience

visual media in ways that are strongly mediated for them. Whether

used as a primary or a secondary source, feature films frame the

history they depict through the carefully edited interplay of visual

images, dialogue, and music; historical documentaries scan across

images and focus attention on particular details. While still images

also use complex visual conventions about which students should

learn, these teachers suggested that such images require students

to do more of their own work focusing on details, scanning the

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background for useful information, and comparing images to one

another.

To strengthen their skills in analyzing visual media, students should

be introduced to ideas about the composition of the image, its

historical context, and theoretical issues related to representation.

Many questions about the form of the image have been explored

most thoroughly in the history of art. Introductions to art history

such as Sylvan Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Art (2005)

can be useful to faculty interested in learning more about analyzing

images. In my courses, some of the questions we consider about

the composition of the image include: How is lightness, darkness

and color used in the image? How is the image structured? What is

represented at the highest point in the image and the lowest? How

are the figures posed and represented? A close reading of the

image might also address issues of symbolism and authorial

intention. Are there symbols or figures which represent specific

ideas in the image? Why might some figures be standing upright

and others posed in different ways? What is not represented in the

image, and what do these absences signify? Why did the image's

creator make these choices? In his class on the Chinese cultural

revolution, for example, my colleague Ethan Segal discusses

propaganda posters and asks his students: "What elements in the

composition of the posters convey the message of the party?" and

"How do the posters reflect changes in those messages over time?"

In the process of interpreting the artistic style and political

messages of these images, students also gain a better feeling for

the power and passion of the movement's supporters.

In terms of historical context, students should be encouraged not

only to pay close attention to an image's production and circulation,

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but also to the responses of the image's audience. In most cases,

this information cannot be learned from the image itself, but only

from the caption, the instructor, or an assigned text. Initially,

students might focus on the caption, thinking about the ways in

which it influences their responses to the image. In a first-year

writing seminar, for instance, another colleague Stephen Rohs asks

students to write their own captions for a series of photographs

from Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the

American Civil War (1866, reprinted 2001). Comparing their own

captions with Gardner's original descriptions not only helps

students to understand how written texts contribute to visual

understanding, but also highlights the ways in which earlier

understandings of the Civil War differ from current conceptions.

During the course of the semester, as students become more

familiar with image-makers, places of publication, and types of

images, they may be able to contribute more historical context to

their readings of images. In my course on immigration, for example,

students discuss the maps and photographs of Chinatown

reproduced in Nayan Shah's Contagious Divides: Epidemics and

Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (2001). In a later writing

assignment about an illustration comparing Chinese and American

dwellings, some students used Shah to show how the angles and

lighting of the Chinese image echoed popular photographs,

suggesting that the picture used the visual rhetoric of photography

(Figure 2).

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Turning from formal and

historical considerations to theoretical issues about visual

representation, it is clear that images are no more direct transcripts

of history than many other primary sources. When used as

evidence rather than illustration, images have typically been

examined for one of two conflicting but related purposes: they are

invoked either as accurate documentary evidence or as distortions

of history. Some images, namely photographs, seem to make

particularly strong claims of objective representation—what Roland

Barthes called "the reality effect"—while other pictures, such as

drawings and paintings, are often viewed with suspicion. Liz Wells's

Photography: A Critical Introduction (2000) offers a useful

introduction to this issue, exploring the ways in which photographs

are constructed to create the reality effect. However, while students

should be made aware of the ways that images could be unreliable

sources, they should also be encouraged to move beyond this

approach. The reading of images as either accurate or inaccurate

reinforces the practice of reading the (invented) image against

(actual) experience, authenticating or questioning visual

representations exclusively by reference to historical events rather

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than also seeing the ways in which images themselves can shape

experience. Students are typically receptive to viewing images as

part of history, as competing truths about historical actors and

events. Visual media can be used very effectively to trace the

development of ideas about industrialization, how war has been

experienced and censored, and the ways that racial stereotypes

have changed over time.3

One additional consideration is the question of using images in

courses with particularly difficult content, such as war, violence, and

racial stereotyping. Visual representations were often central to

these histories: the spectacle of lynching was intentionally deployed

in photographic postcards, and the visual documentation of

concentration camps framed postwar understandings of the

Holocaust. In these cases, the first consideration is whether or not

to show these images. Sometimes this decision may be based on

issues specific to the course: Do the students seem ready to

engage seriously in viewing such images? And does the course

allow sufficient time to do this? At other times, ethical

considerations may be primary and can be effectively discussed

with students: What role, for example, did the depicted subjects

have in their representation? And were the images reproduced to

exploit or expose their suffering? My colleague Kenneth Waltzer,

who teaches a course on the history of the Holocaust, believes that

students need to see the visual evidence of the Holocaust, not only

the more familiar post-liberation photographs, but also the Nazi's

own images of their killing installations and their victims. "I cannot

not use images," he notes, suggesting the ethical obligation to

seriously consider this visual record. However, he prepares

students carefully and uses images sparingly, warning them about

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the nature of the photographs and balancing images with survivors'

voices and testimonies.

Images are already present in our students' lives, both in and out of

the classroom. By paying more attention to the images in our

history texts, using new resources to introduce additional significant

images, and bringing a critical eye to these media, we can build on

our students' interests, strengthen their engagement in history, and

help them to become more critically aware both about the world of

the past and the world in which they live today.

—Anna Pegler-Gordon is assistant professor of history at the

James Madison College of Michigan State University. She is

currently engaged in a research project on the role of images in

teaching history, supported by a Michigan State Lilly Endowment

Teaching Fellowship, and is completing a book about the role of

photography in the development of U.S. immigration policy.

Notes

1. Diana Oblinger, "Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millenials:

Understanding the New Students," Educause Review (July/August

2003), 37–47.

2. U.S Immigration Bureau, Annual Report of the Commissioner-

General of Immigration (Washington, GPO: 1904 and 1907). This

collection is available through two archival web sites: The Statue of

Liberty Monument web site http://www.americanparknetwork.com

/parkinfo/sl/photo/, and the New York Public Library Digital Gallery

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore

/dgexplore.cfm?topic=history&collection=EllisIslandPhotograp&

col_id=165.

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3. See, for example: T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris

in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1984); John R. Stilgoe, Railroads and the

American Scene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Paul

Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception translated by

Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989); George H. Roeder, The

Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and, Matthew Frye

Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants

and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1998).

Resources

Some general texts that may be particularly helpful to historians

thinking about how to use images in their classrooms include: John

Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1973), Peter Burke’s Eyewitnessing: The

Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (2001), Gillian Rose’s Visual

Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual

Materials (2001), and Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright’s

Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001).

In addition to these secondary readings, archival resources

(including extensive visual resources) are constantly being made

available online. These electronic resources are particularly rich in

U.S. history, including the Library of Congress' American Memory

Collection and the Online Archive of California. The Digital History

web site provides a useful portal to many American digital

collections, including a broad range of images through its "historical

reference room." Like traditional archives, some online versions can

be difficult to locate and navigate. However, they allow students and

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faculty the opportunity to find visual media specific to their interests,

often alongside other important primary sources. For example, the

illustrations in the commercial online archive of Harper’s Illustrated

Weekly are presented in their original format in the periodical,

allowing students to link the images with the articles that they

illustrate. Such web sites also include virtual exhibitions that can be

helpful to place primary sources in context, as well as useful

teaching resources.

The increasing availability of technology within the classroom is

also an aid to using visual images, but it is not a requirement. While

digital projectors and in-class web access offer convenient ways of

presenting visual media, simpler technologies such as overhead

projectors and photocopies of images can be equally effective. In

many of my courses, we use one class session to view original

archival images in the Michigan State University Museum’s

collection. Although not all schools and colleges have such

resources, many campuses contain a wealth of underused visual

resources in museums, special collections, or even publications in

the library’s general collections.

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