Abstract
This book is about the “photographic turn” in oral history. Historians’ interest in photographs—their “discovery of old photographs”—dates back, according to Raphael Samuel’s observations in Great Britain, to the early 1960s.3 Historians back then evaluated their visual evidence much less critically than their traditional textual sources, treating photographs, as Samuel criticized, as “transparent reflections of fact.”4 Cultural and family historians as well as archivists seized on photographs in the 1970s, concentrating on their assumedly self-evident informational value.5 Over the last two decades, the use of photographs has come under greater critical scrutiny. In turning the object of its research into a category of analysis, the discipline of history has moved toward a “pictorial turn,” a “visual turn,” an “iconic turn,” or, more focused, a “turn to photography.”6
But photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation. Looked at in this way, as evidence of something beyond itself, a photograph can best be understood not as an answer or an end to inquiry, but as an invitation to look more closely, and to ask questions.
—Phillip Gourevitch1
We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.
—Walter J.Ong2
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Notes
Phillip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 148,
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© 2011 Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson
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Freund, A., Thomson, A. (2011). Introduction: Oral History and Photography. In: Freund, A., Thomson, A. (eds) Oral History and Photography. Palgarve Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120099_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120099_1
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