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DOI: 10.1177/1470412910380348
2010 9: 259 Journal of Visual Culture
Lynn Hunt and Vanessa R. Schwartz
Capturing the Moment: Images and Eyewitnessing in History

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Vol 9(3): 259271 DOI 10.1177/1470412910380348
Editorial
Capturing the Moment: Images and Eyewitnessing in History
Lynn Hunt and Vanessa R. Schwartz
Images have a deeply ambivalent relationship to time. The single image appears
to freeze it, capture it, and memorialize it, and in doing so works against the
ow of duration. Yet images are also resolutely historical since they incorporate
within their very material a history of their making: a long history of techniques,
preferences for subjects, and expectations about viewers. The essays gathered
here examine this intimate connection between image, time, and history by
considering images, image making, and the historical use of images in different
times and places. Taken together, they offer a panoramic view of some of the
most signicant cultural, technological and temporal developments in the ways
images encode notions of historicity. Using a variety of historical, art historical,
and media studies approaches, these essays set up a series of productive tensions
about images and their historical qualities that will be of interest to anyone
concerned with the study and production of visual culture.
1
Although the modern era does not enjoy a privileged relationship to the visual,
photography and its development have reframed the debates about visual
representation and especially the relation of images to history (Tucker, 2009).
Photography seemed to promise a direct trace of reality and therefore a true
capturing of the historical moment. Siegfried Kracauer (1997[1960]) insisted,
for example, that photography has an outspoken afnity for unstaged reality
(p. 18). Few would endorse that view now, yet photography did have profound
effects on thinking about the relation between the image and the external
world represented in it. Indeed, Francis Haskell (1993) argues that the advent of
photography led to a radical reorientation of historians towards images as a means
to understand the past. Scholars began to reinterpret the images made before
photography (whether they were paintings, sculptures, prints, or tapestries)
through a photographic imaginary, assuming that people had always more or
less attempted to represent the real. Thus the 19th-century English historian
260 journal of visual culture 9(3)
Edward Augustus Freeman could view the Bayeux Tapestry of the 11th century
as though it were the work of a highly qualied war correspondent (p. 143).
Does photography really mark a turning point in the approach toward images
and, if so, what more precisely is the nature of that transformation? Haskell
maintains that photography had the paradoxical effect of strengthening
the authority of all images, even though it was immediately understood
by contemporaries that the camera could also lie (p. 4). The early history of
photography, sketched by Walter Benjamin in A Short History of Photography
in 1931 and given even greater specicity in the essay by Thierry Gervais in
this issue, shows that photography did not establish its authority immediately
(Benjamin, 1972[1931]). Moreover, the eventual ubiquity of photography, its lack
of selectivity, its easy access to just about everything in its path may well tell
us less about the past being captured by photography than about a culture in
which image-making was a constant activity. One of the goals of this issue is to
question the dominance of photographic metaphors in discussing images and
in so doing to clear a path toward new ways of analyzing the capacity of all
images to communicate knowledge about the past. Since the 1970s, historians
of photography have generally succeeded in demythologizing its status as a
privileged conveyor of information (Tagg, 1988). No clear lines divided early
19th-century portrait painting from the rst daguerreotypes, the landscapes of
John Constable from early landscape photographs (Galassi, 1981), or the mid-
19th century war photographs analyzed by Gervais from the engravings of them
that actually appeared in the newspapers of the time.
The inuence of photographic metaphors can be seen in our own title for this
issue: the photograph and its analog and digital descendants are often presumed
to be the instruments best suited for capturing the moment and therefore enjoy
a distinctive status as literal eyewitnesses to events. We aim to put these notions
under pressure. The essays in this issue do not in general propose to use images
to straightforwardly reveal evidence about the historical moments captured in
them. Rather than looking through the images to the world outside or seeking
documentary evidence in the images, the authors examine the history of images
and their relation to image making for what they reveal about both history and
images more generally. They address such issues as the differences between the
trace, the relic and the illustration for what they can tell us about the relation
between images and the world external to them and depicted in them. Taken
together the authors suggest that by studying the human image-making capacity
and the images generated in the past, we will gain a richer and more complex
sense of human experience. To do this, a long historical view is helpful, and so
we begin with some of the earliest known images by humans, the cave art made
between 34,000 and 11,000 years ago.
Just what do the thousands of images found in rock shelters and caves signify?
Margaret Conkeys examination of the interpretive dilemmas involved reminds
us that in the case of Paleolithic art there is not enough supporting evidence
to contextualize images in any denitive fashion or even to determine that they
were intended to serve as art in ways that would be familiar to us. This paucity of
documentation has not stopped those who have encountered the bison, horses,
Hunt and Schwartz Editorial 261
and deer on cave walls from giving it their best interpretive shot. Researchers
persistently make assumptions about those who painted these images, and those
assumptions say more about humans living in recent generations than about
those living 34,000 years ago. Yet Paleolithic images seem to speak to us even
though we cannot understand their language. Those images thus invariably create
a tension between them (the image-makers of the past) and us (the interpreters
in the present) even while we seek to use the images and their makers image-
making capacity to nd links between early humans and ourselves.
The history of lling in the blanks is, in and of itself, an important way for us
to examine the relation between images and the historical record. In her essay
on early 20th-century attempts to depict hominids and large mammals in the
Pleistocene Age (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago), Victoria Cain zooms in on two
major pedagogues obsessed with visualizing the long distant past: Henry Faireld
Osborn, president of New York Citys American Museum of Natural History,
and the artist Charles Robert Knight, who painted murals of Neanderthal, Cro-
Magnon, and Neolithic peoples as well as action-packed paintings of prehistoric
sea reptiles and dinosaurs. Critics at the time and ever since have deplored
the fantasy element in such representations, despite Knights and Osborns
efforts to rely on the best available fossil evidence. Yet might not such virtual
witnessing or visually induced vicarious experience have positive effects, even
when imaginative elements are in danger of running riot? Knights and Osborns
attempts at literal visualization of the deep past allowed viewers to feel kinship
with early humans, including those who made cave art, and to appreciate the
drama of life on earth even before the species of homo appeared, and they did so
in ways that were much more compelling to the viewers attention than a fossil
lying inert in a cabinet. As Karen Halttunen remarks in her comment on these
essays, the attempt to shake hands with the cave man may strain credulity but
images nonetheless open windows on to the times of their making, whether that
time is the Pleistocene or Victorian America.
Already, then, we have arrived at that place where images always seem to lead,
or rather mislead. The only thing certain about cave art is that it is human-made,
and the attempt to recreate its original makers in modern murals or tableaux
can only be illusory. Marie-Jos Mondzain is concerned with teasing out the
possible meanings of what transpired in the caves involving images by going
right into the heart of the philosophical issues in the Western tradition. Images
are, by denition, lesser, because they signal absence. According to John 1:1: In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The image or icon was never God. By creating a tradition steeped in analogical
ctions, Christianity positioned the very idea of representation as the domain
of similitude between the creator and humanity. Iconoclasts and iconophiles
then battled as to what value and truth could be revealed in humanitys image-
making capacity. But neither side pondered the centrality of humanitys ability to
produce images in the rst instance.
If Conkeys essay struggles with the possibility of what cave inscriptions might
mean and what value their discovery has had for us, Mondzain returns to the cave
with an imagined scenario for the purposes of identifying what importance the
262 journal of visual culture 9(3)
fact of the making of the images had for the development of the human ability to
see. She identies in the process of image-making the moment in which humans
become spectators and in so doing, she argues, they develop the capacity to see
outside themselves. For her then, the trace of the hand of the early human is
testimony to the passing of that person in that space at that moment. The image is a
mark of the hand and a fundamental step in the development of human subjectivity.
Thomas Habinek suggests in his comment that the contrast between word and
image evoked by Mondzain has also led to a philosophical privileging of the word
and abstract systems of representation. As a result, we have tended to treat images
as a linguistic equivalent, searching for their meanings distinct from the artifact
of their presentation. Yet by pondering archaeological and architectural remains
as the essays by Megan ONeil and Erika Naginski do, the rst about the Ancient
Maya and the second about an early modern scholarly interest in archaeological
vestiges, we can better understand the basis by which these inscribed objects
function as prostheses for human embodied cognition (Conkey, this issue, and
Joyce, 2008). The idea of embodied cognition leads us to ask whether images,
re-thought as spaces of inscription, are literally external projections of the
operations of the human mind. Hugo Munsterberg (2002) memorably argued
about lm that The mind develops memory ideas and imaginative ideas; in the
moving pictures they become reality (p. 110). Alternatively, might images be
considered more appropriately as instruments of human experience rather than
mere reections of mental events? In either case, to study these images (and
to ponder them as objects) is to link them as sites of historical evidence to
the broader issues of the experience of humanity and its interaction with the
material world.
Still more specically, we can use such evidence to gain insight into past
notions of history and temporality. For the ancient Maya, inscribed human and
anthropomorphic bodies on stone became the basis for creating a sense of
historicity. What ONeil shows is the way such artifacts can be repurposed over
time, transformed into relics of sorts, and valued for their antiquity. In this way,
the physical placement and ordering of these objects in buildings rather than
what is inscribed on the objects themselves becomes a way into understanding
how the past itself functioned as a meaningful part of ancient Mayan culture.
What ONeils essay does not explicitly render problematic but is equally salient
is the role of the archaeologist in excavating and uncovering such objects.
Why and how did these objects remain buried for so long while many other
images and objects from Maya antiquity had already been extricated from their
discontinuous contact with a living culture? What do these differences tell us
about the way certain images are chosen to construct Maya history and how that
history evolves over time?
Tracing the lives of images as objects long after the moment of their creation can
tell us a great deal about the history of the reinterpreters. This is precisely what
Erika Naginski does for a much later time and in the context of an early modern
European narrative about the role that architectural ruins played in developing
notions of history. In fact, one might understand Naginskis essay, which explains
how architecture played a role in advancing the importance of visual evidence,
Hunt and Schwartz Editorial 263
as also illuminating the sort of methodology practiced by ONeil, since Naginski
pinpoints a moment in intellectual history when humanists turned with great
enthusiasm to ponder the material vestiges of the past and to travel to their sites
as the best road towards their illumination. The eld of archaeology has followed
this course ever since.
Naginski draws our attention to the Baroque privileging of the material versus
the textual bases of history by describing the way ruins became imbued with
a certain auratic value as they, themselves, provide the literal physical link that
bridges the historian to the past that he or she seeks to understand. In addition,
she identies the process by which visualization became more closely tied to
precision and thus to claims about historical truth. Her essay is also vital for
this collection of essays about images as evidence because she identies a key
moment during which images emerged for intellectuals as primary sources;
images, these scholars believed, contained what it was that the ancients sought
to teach posterity about its society long past.
Naginskis Baroque antiquarians expressed their views in print, accompanied
by woodcut and engraved images that reproduced their visual evidence in
two dimensions. Print culture and images were thus obviously connected long
before the advent of photography. Mary Elizabeth Berrys essay examines how
the revolution in print in early modern Japan led to what she calls a new normal
in attitudes toward images and their content. In this context, she insists that
the single image stages a narrative proposition that can only be understood
with recourse to knowledge of conventions of representation and the world
outside the image. Seemingly mundane images not only register changes in
conventional representations of social norms but also work to further them at
the same time. Berry thus underscores that images create human actions in the
world as a response to them. She also reminds us that no image stands alone and
that some images are best grasped when bundled in large groups of like images
and understood as much through their venue of publication, in her case new
cheap books that are part of what she calls the library of public information.
The generic patterns then emerge as the salient aspects of such images. Berry
argues that these images did, in fact, aspire to depict their own world. In looking
at such a group of images, she suggests that for the rst time ordinary Japanese
were able to see their own everyday lives represented back to them. In particular,
she identies the importance of the diagram and images of work and play and
the street, all part of an instructive impulse embedded in the production of these
genre images.
Methodologically, this essay renders more historically concrete Mondzains
proposition about the trace of the cave painters hand; that trace creates the
spectator and thus subjectivity and possibly the student as well, who learns to act
properly and relate to the images through acts of emulation. The question of the
publics relationship to generic images is not limited to early modern Japan. As
Will Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
and champion of the Code that came to bear his name remarked: The head of the
house sees a new kind of golf suit in the movies and he wants one ... Perhaps the
whole family gets a new idea for redecorating and refurnishing the parlor and
264 journal of visual culture 9(3)
down they go to the dealers to ask for the new goods (Hays, 1972[1927]: 38). In his
comment on Berrys essay, Jeff Wasserstrom takes emulation to yet another place
and time, China during the Cultural Revolution. He shows that even seemingly
generic images can be used to blur the lines between past, present, and future by
creating a vision of the utopia to come. It seems likely that this temporal blurring
is a distinctive characteristic of images and not just of photographs. Wasserstrom
also suggests that despite the recognition of the everyday and commonplace
stressed by Berry in generic images, context (national or otherwise) can radically
re-shape how such images work and what they mean.
Because her images are printed, Berry has many of them at her disposition and
the wholesale disappearance of images is not at issue. Many of our other authors,
in contrast, have to make as much as possible from what little remains after
the erasures of time. Richard Taws underlines the inevitable absence, loss, and
invisibility that form the sometimes barely perceptible contextual history of
the production and reception of images, both at the time of their fabrication
and through their longer circulation and re-uses. His observation applies even
to our omnivorous digital age where every passing thought or action seems
to be registered somewhere. Since the complete context of an image is never
recoverable, even for the most recent ones, the question is how we should interpret
what we do have at our disposal. Taws registers the increasing dissatisfaction
of art historians with their own representational paradigm developed since the
Renaissance, in which two-dimensional objects such as paintings are privileged
(and all other objects rendered like them) because they can be read for
their signifying content like texts, even when not seen as direct analogies of
the real. The matter or material embodiment of the image, Taws insists, might
itself constitute evidence at least as important as the representational content
usually assumed to be its raison dtre. Whereas Habinek pursued this line of
criticism in a more general philosophical fashion, Taws sets it up as a disciplinary
and interdisciplinary problem, suggesting that answers might be found in a
productive interdisciplinary exchange, not just of methods of approach, but of
images themselves. If, for example, historians paid more attention to the category
of art, they might be able to consider abstraction as itself a form of evidence that
is as telling as the thematic or iconographic content of a visual artifact.
If images can be considered as prescriptive and as the basis for imitation across
time and place, photographys indexicality seemed to change the terms of the
debate about the relation of the image to the world outside it. For, without
belaboring the obvious, photography offered to trace the material world rather
than depict it and in that way is descended from such technologies as the
camera obscura, as Jonathan Crary (1990) has shown. But as Thierry Gervais
demonstrates, no matter what its ontological status, photography in its earliest
applications did not stand in as a complete trace of the world; or, rather, the
trace itself did not have the currency to necessarily stand in as the best form of
illustration of actual events, at least in the mass press. Convention dictated what
could pass as accurate news and editors initially compared photography rather
unfavorably to grand history paintings, on the one hand, and to the engravings
that they had published before the advent of photography, on the other.
Hunt and Schwartz Editorial 265
Nancy Troy underscores Gervaiss observation that photographs are also
aesthetic renderings as well as indices. But she also asks us to consider
photographys inuence on and its proximity to events in shaping aesthetic
production more generally. Rather than simply watch and paint or paint from
memory, painters could and did turn to photography either for inspiration
or as intermediary objects in the history of representation made after life.
Photographs also could be tampered with in creative ways that suggest another
form of creative activity, sometimes by manipulating the image, sometimes
by the addition of a caption, which can make parts of the photograph either
visible or invisible.
Gervaiss essay on photography during the mid-century Crimean War and the
Russo-Japanese War suggests that a cleavage existed in the early mass press
between the rhetoric of photographys promise and its actual application
and use. In the end, of course, photography did become the dominant
journalistic medium for conveying the news in visual form, so Gervaiss essay
thus also opens a window onto the very early history of the formation of the
photojournalist.
An unsettled matter is whether what counts as the news in the 20th century has
been shaped by the powerful specicities of photographys graphic capacities.
From Gervaiss essay we might conclude that early photography could not shape
the news because it only made sense when contextualized by its layout, both
visual and verbal. In later decades, however, photographs of the news seemed to
exert more and more inuence on their own.
Sharon Sliwinski and Macarena Gmez-Barris consider the limit cases (as Berry
calls them) of historical atrocity, the Holocaust and the torture and killing of
political opponents in Pinochets Chile and Guatemalas dirty war. Photography
in these cases reaches the limits of what can be represented. Yet, for all the
questions about its function in such cases, photography has had a profound impact
on the understanding of atrocity, even if not always in the expected ways. As
Sliwinski argues, the viewers who were so transxed by Lee Millers photographs
of Dachau did not initially understand what they were seeing. Readers of Life
and Vogue in 1945 saw French, Russian, Belgian and Polish victims of the Nazi
regime, not Jews. The photographs may have captured the moment and served
as a form of eyewitnessing but, in the rst instance, they only captured horror
and a partial historical truth. They remained traces in need of interpretation
based on other kinds of sources. Gmez-Barris confronts a dilemma produced in
some measure by Holocaust photographs like Millers. Because photographs of
the Holocaust eventually came to have such iconic value in the representation
of atrocity, murderous generals and political leaders of later decades went out of
their way to prevent any photographic record of their activities. In the absence
of photography, those who wanted to insist on remembering what had happened
in both Chile and Guatemala sought out other kinds of visual evidence, from the
exhumation of mass graves and drawings by former detainees of what they had
experienced to documentaries and ctional recreations of events. Both essays,
however, suggest that photographs have come to replace internal memories
(those of the minds eye) in the modern world.
266 journal of visual culture 9(3)
In her comment on these two essays, Julia Adeney Thomas draws attention to
the ways photography resists incorporation into the discursive world. She
takes up the position of Roland Barthes that puts photography and historical
understanding at odds with one another. Sliwinski focuses on the same tension
but frames it differently. She is more interested than Barthes was in the ways
Millers photographs, even as initially misconstrued by photographer and
viewers alike, nonetheless bore the mark of the horror of the Holocaust. As a
consequence, even when misunderstood, the photographs carried within them
something that demanded interpretation, however inadequate. Moreover, since
Miller led both textual and photographic reports, Sliwinski is able to consider
the gap that separates events from both words and images. She makes especially
telling use of Cathy Caruths work on the paradoxes of trauma, which Sliwinski
traces through visual symptoms. For Thomas, this constitutes socializing
trauma, as if to contain it within a historical context but, for Sliwinski, there is
a psychological dimension too that testies simultaneously to the power and
powerlessness of the photograph; trauma cannot be grasped (or represented
with clarity) at the time of its occurrence but it remains embedded as a memory
whose voice is constantly calling out.
It is precisely the emotive power of the photograph that makes its utter absence
in Chile and Guatemala all the more frustrating to those who want to insist upon
the remembrance of things done. As Thomas remarks in her comments, this lack
actually opens a space for imaginative re-viewing of the tortures and killings
that took place. In her account of the variety of forms this re-viewing has taken,
Gmez-Barris insists that the point of their endeavors is not to close up the
wound created and hidden from view, but to reopen it again and again, to refuse
closure, to break apart the coherent narratives and unsettle collective memories.
Since, as she says, witnessing is never a complete act, even for and perhaps
especially for survivors, ctionalized recreations can play a very important role,
a role that remains to be theorized more generally and whose relationship to
history more clearly evaluated. This point resonates in surprising ways with
questions raised about the visualization of prehistoric peoples. What are the
ethical risks and potential gains created by historical visualization in the absence
of a complete visual record? And since the visual record is always incomplete,
just where do we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms
of historical visualization as reconstitution? Is it a question of time, evidence, or
simply convention?
For all the criticism of photography as inadequate for representing specic
historical traumas, photographys indexical mode makes it virtually irresistible
as a time machine. Since its earliest moments in the 19th century, photography
has maintained a close tie to urban culture and especially the rapid changes that
characterized urban development in Europe during the mediums rst 50 years.
Katja Zelljadt grapples with photographys role in documenting social change
and provoking nostalgia in her essay about Berlin. The dynamism of urban
change could not be arrested but photographs might provide a record of what
the demolition crews erased. In that way, rather than mere traces of the present,
Berlin photos could become an archive of the lost world. What Zelljadt suggests
Hunt and Schwartz Editorial 267
is that, over time, the association of photography with the past made the medium
the perfect vehicle for the production of nostalgia. Photographys capacity to
eternalize the present into the future and thus stand as a record of the past
began to inuence photography itself. Thus, she shows how, around the turn of
the century, photographers, rather than continue with a merely archival impulse,
began to fabricate nostalgia by using photographs to represent the survival of
Old Berlin. Rather than refer to the image archives they had been producing
for nearly 50 years, photographers instead thought their medium could convey
the simultaneity of the past with the present by photographing windmills and
contemporary historicist architecture as signs of the citys antiquity. Instead
of a time machine for capturing the moment, photography served the need to
represent time in general and helped create a picture for the nostalgic impulses
that emerged as Berlin hurtled into a present that seemed overwhelmed by
change. Zelljadts analysis of photography in Berlin should be compared to the
remarkable essay by Elizabeth Edwards about the photographic survey movement
in England, 18851918 (Edwards, 2009).
If Zelljadts photographers were keenly aware of the layers of time, despite its
horizontal presentation in photographic form, the hypercities project, which
Phil Ethington describes in his extended comment, suggests that photographys
indexical platform now provides the basis for what we might consider a
powerful form of immaterial archaeology. Ethington points out that isolating
the mediums temporality without recourse to its capacity to underscore
spatiality misses one of the fundamental effects of the fact that photography
creates a framed and re-presented visual eld. Indeed, Ethington suggests the
intertwining of the two terms as spacetime and thus forces us to consider
whether the capture of a moment is as much about dening place as time.
Ethington asks us to think of photographs as maps produced by and interpreted
in the minds visual eld. The hypercities project builds on the notion of space
time; simultaneously expanding both the spatial and temporal networks of
contextualization for artifacts such as photographs. In this way, it is hoped, a
digital project can provide more than just a storehouse of already known
information; its very nature can prompt rethinking of the spatial and temporal
relationships captured within city images.
What Ethington calls the tension between an assimilative and an exceptional
view of photography weaves in and out of all the essays on photography and may
even be seen as constitutive of images more generally. In the assimilative view, the
photograph (or image) is a sign like all other signs and therefore dependent on
context for its meanings. In the exceptional view, associated by Ethington (and
Thomas earlier) with Barthes, the photograph, unlike other images, is indexical;
that is, it directs attention to its object without any mediation. As Charles Sanders
Peirce dened them, indexical signs direct the attention to their objects by blind
compulsion (Buchler, 1955: 108).
The essays collected here tiptoe on the taut line suspended between the two
poles of the assimilative and the exceptional views: since they focus on the
purpose of images, they necessarily seek to illuminate their social agenda and
therefore rely on their assimilation to other signs, but the essays repeatedly go
268 journal of visual culture 9(3)
beyond assimilation because the authors are acutely attuned to the ambiguity
inherent in seeing images. Viewing is at once biologically and therefore
transhistorically rooted as well as socially and culturally inected. As a result
of this unstable combination of registers of meaning, images resist assimilation
even while they seem to require it. Peirce noted that an image is an absolutely
singular representation (Buchler, 1955: 242). It cannot be inferred from the set
of other similar representations, and yet it cannot be grasped at all without some
preceding interpretive acts. Peirce argued that any proposition which would
include any interpretation of an image must refer to two signs: the icon, as in,
for example, the mental composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinker
has experienced, and the index, all whereby he distinguishes that day (Peirce,
1998: 20, original emphasis).
In short, these essays about specic images end up posing profound philosophical
questions about images more generally, even when that is not their announced
intention. Derided over the centuries as inherently inadequate, misleading,
evanescent, and, like women, with whom they are often associated, alternatively
dangerously seductive and merely entertaining, images nonetheless turn out to be
remarkably good to think with. In fact, as Ethingtons invocation of Wittgensteins
powerfully enigmatic picture theory of meaning reminds us, images may prove
crucial to any and all forms of knowledge. Wittgensteins metaphor was that a
picture reaches right out to reality; that it is laid against reality like a measure.
Images are a way we know the world, not as a mirror of it, but as tools for
grabbing hold of it, however imperfectly.
Viewed in this way, images are inherently multivalent. They all have some kind
of relationship to the world they capture but only because it makes sense for
us to see them in those ways. If phenomenology and pragmatism (Peirce being
a prime example of the latter) have recently been revived as philosophical
positions, it is because they pay more attention to this in-betweenness and in
particular to the way all mental processes, including vision and interpretation,
are themselves embodied. Images are always in transit between the world and
our brains, and the trafc is not just two-way (world meets brain, brain greets
world); it is continuously and unpredictably circulating, for brains and the world
both change over time and both are shaped as well by social and cultural changes.
Moreover, this trafc in images is largely kinesthetic. Images provide whole body
experiences that are largely non-verbal and are not even limited to vision since
vision is connected to all the other senses.
For this reason, as several of the essays here suggest, visual culture cannot
be adequately analyzed using only metaphors derived from language (the
image as representation) or for that matter from vision alone, however
scientically grounded. The phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (1962[1944]) explained why this was true while also showing the
interweaving of space and time:
My eld of perception is constantly lled with a play of colors, noises and
eeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of
my clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless immediately place
Hunt and Schwartz Editorial 269
in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally
constantly I weave dreams round things. I imagine people and things
whose presence is not incompatible with the context, yet who are not in
fact involved with it: they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary.
If the reality of my perception were based on the intrinsic coherence of
representations, it ought to be for ever hesitant and, being wrapped up in
endless conjectures on probabilities, I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart
misleading syntheses. (p. x)
If we can extrapolate from what Merleau-Ponty says here about perception more
generally, images not only provide a rich eld for tapping into various kinds of
non-verbal experience; they require attention to the history of unconscious
motivation and the experience of the other senses. Images offer access, like fairy
tales, to an imaginary social world because we are always weaving dreams round
things and imagining people and things that are ahead of reality.
Although the visual eld is primary in transmitting the experiences of the past
because images, whether in stone, paint, or paper, last longer than smells or
sounds, many of the essays presented here serve to remind us that behind those
images were dirty hands, clanging chisels, smoking lamps, noisy streets, fear,
hunger, bereavement, or exaltation. The study of visual culture leads naturally
to something resembling a multi-sensory history, at least in its imaginative
reconstruction. This applies not only to the making of the images but also to the
material in which their making ends up embodied. The material embodiment of
an image is not some kind of irrelevant support for the real work of its thematic
content. The paint in cave art deserves as much attention as the animals and
people depicted, for it tells its own story in its own way. The image itself thus
has a history independent of its reception in any particular moment of its history.
While some scholars would link this approach to new discussions of material
culture and thing theory (Miller, 1998, 2005; Brown, 2001), this sort of historical
materialism seems entirely consonant with anthropologically-inected cultural
history as it developed over the last 30 or 40 years.
Some might complain that studies of visual culture today lack a theoretical
driving force, a paradigm governing research, or an overarching argument such
as those advanced by feminism, poststructuralism, or post-colonialism. Visual
culture is less than a discipline (no doubt happily so) and more than an expertise.
We believe that, taken together, these essays point to the ways in which old
verities might nally be overturned and new directions laid out. Visual sources
can no longer be viewed as pretty handmaidens (that association with women
again) to traditional language-centered disciplines such as history or as simply
part of the enrichment provided by background contextualization of arguments
about art. At a time when teleological accounts of history (the progress of
modernity) and art history (e.g. the rise of linear perspective or modernism)
have fallen into disfavor, the arguments of those such as Benjamin (1999) and
Kracauer (1997[1960]) have gained new salience. They saw that visual forms
such as photography and lm created new experiences of individual subjectivity
and, in the process, suggested new kinds of history writing.
270 journal of visual culture 9(3)
History traditionally relied on textual documentation presented with verbal
analysis that lent itself, by the linear nature of language, to a serial chronological
narrative. The newer forms of social and cultural history have incorporated this
preference for textual bases and narrative form, even when they wanted to work
against the latter, in particular; the narrative, especially in analytical social history,
ended up being implicit rather than explicit. Benjamins emphasis on montage and
juxtaposition, and Kracauers on dissociation and the kinetic receptivity of the
viewer, enable us to imagine a different kind of history writing that looks for links
across time and space rather than in a narrative progression and that pays much
more attention to affect, embodiment, and subjectivity than is usually the case. In
this way, the study of visual culture might contribute not only to a new theory of
knowledge but also to new practices of the presentation of knowledge. In any
case, these are the kinds of questions we hope these essays will raise for readers.
Note
1. These essays were initially presented at the Capturing the Moment workshop from
12 May 2009, held at UCLA and USC.
References
Benjamin, W. (1972[1931]) A Short History of Photography, Screen 13: 526.
Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. H. Eiland and K.
McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.
Brown, B. (ed.) (2001) Things, Critical Inquiry, special issue, 28(1).
Buchler, J. (ed.) (1955) Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Crary, J. (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Edwards, E. (2009) Photography and the Material Performance of the Past, in J. Tucker
(ed.) Photography and Historical Interpretation, History and Theory 48, special issue:
13050.
Galassi, P. (1981) Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. New
York: Museum of Modern Art.
Haskell, F. (1993) History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hays, W. (1972 [1927]) Supervision from Within, in J.P. Kennedy (ed.) The Story of Films.
New York: Jerome S. Ozer Publisher.
Joyce, R. (2008) When the Flesh Is Solid but the Person Is Hollow Inside: Formal Variation
in Hand-Modeled Figurines from Formative Mesoamerica, in D. Boric and J. Robb (eds)
Past Bodies, pp. 3745. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Kracauer, S. (1997[1960]) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962[1944] Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London:
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Miller, D. (1998) Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. London: University College
London Press.
Miller, D. (ed) (2005) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Munsterberg, H. (2002) The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed.
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Hunt and Schwartz Editorial 271
Tagg, J. (1988) Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories.
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Bertrand-Dorlac, C.D. and Gunthert, A. (eds) (2001) Image et histoire, Vingtime
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Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Her interest in visual culture began with
her study of the etchings and engravings of the French Revolution (Politics,
Culture and Class in the French Revolution, University of California Press,
1984). Among her most recent books are La storia culturale nellet globale
(Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2010), The Book That Changed Europe (with Margaret
Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, Harvard University Press, 2010), Measuring Time:
Making History (Central European University Press, 2008) and Inventing
Human Rights (W.W. Norton, 2007). She has written extensively on the French
Revolution and historical methods more generally and edited collections on the
history of eroticism, pornography, and human rights.
Address: UCLA Department of History, 6265 Bunche Hall, Box 951473, Los
Angeles, CA 900951473, USA. [email: lhunt@history.ucla.edu]
Vanessa R. Schwartz is Professor of History, Art History and Film. An historian
on modern visual culture, she was trained in Modern European History with
a concentration on France and urban culture. The author of Its So French!
Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (University
of Chicago Press, 2007) and Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in
Fin-de-Sicle Paris (University of California Press, 1998), she is now working
on the history of the jet age and is writing, for Oxford University Press, A Very
Short Introduction to Modern France. She has also co-edited two volumes,
Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (University of California Press,
1995) and The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 2004),
as well as a special issue of Urban History called Urban Icons (Cambridge
University Press, 2006) co-edited with her colleague, Phil Ethington.
Address: Department of History, University of Southern California, 3520
Trousdale Pkwy, SOS 170, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. [email: vschwart@usc.edu]