Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America, 1866-1994

Abstract

For decades a wide gap has persisted between the ways historians, on one hand, and photographic historians and critics, on the other, “read” images. Historians have discovered that photographs are documents that offer a wealth of information that goes beyond material culture and the perspectives of photographer and client. For their part, photographic historians and critics have shown a greater concern with the “pedigree” of photographer and image: reputation, genre, and such technical details as format, exposure, texture of paper, and printing process. I learned this rudely: at a presentation at FotoFest 1992 in Houston, in which I had been invited to speak on historical photographs as documents for social history, I was literally shouted down by three irate members of the audience when I stated my opinion that for the purposes of social history, the identity of the photographer does not matter and that, in fact, unposed photographs were perhaps the most useful of all.