Historiographic dimensions of the visual turn or what can do the historian when making histories with images?

Abstract

The images aren't new in historiographical research. However, proposals in the early 1990s, the pictorial turn (in the US by W. J. T. Mitchell) and the iconic turn (in Germany by Gottfried Boehm) altered the landscape of interdisciplinary research on visual artifacts through the principles of alterity of images in relation to the language and the historicity of visual culture. To them were added the anachronism of the images and the symptomatology of Georges Didi-Huberman, historian of French art. This text evaluates the historiographic impact of the images turns in two fundamental aspects of the work of historians: the production of an heuristic of the image as historical source; the constructions of time/historicity, visibility and public uses of the past. Crossing resources from the history of historiography and the theory of image and history, the article presents three sessions: the North American, German and French matrices of the pictorial/iconic/visual turns; the historical and historiographic dimensions of the visual turn; the conception of historical source, temporality and the problem of the visibility of the past in the contemporary world.