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The happy task of introducing your president and my friend marnie sandweiss. I want to give you a version of what ive been describing as an intellectual wedding toast. Will present this room as a las vegas wedding chapel and tell the story of marnie and me and her work, which got us all here. Let me start with the magical alchemy of graduate school. All of us led headed thinkers turned into gold tone scholars and teachers picture a process of something that works Something Like this. Imagine a group of students as a cohort. The cohort becomes class mates once in a while they become lifelong friends. So, colleagues, cohort, classmate, colleagues, and that golden thing, a friend. I am cheating a little because money came to yale to study with harlem are a year after me and she was in the History Department and i was in that racked up group of students in american studies. clapping not a cold or exactly but we did become friends, puzzling over readings, yawning over brilliant, but sometimes excruciating seminars. Western history, some of you may know was taught in the basement of the bionicy and as a tribute to herald lamar on friday afternoons. The slow drone of graduate students, our own included listen to me not are on about nevada, the rotten borough, martini a lot better on Carleton Watkins we survived our basement years scattered and became colleagues, commiserating, sharing drafts and solving problems for students for each other and for the professional organizations that support our work. Martys work with the w. H. O. A. So covert, classmate colleague, but for me money and i became friends. A last bit of graduate school alchemy that knit the strange world of ideas where we do our work into the world of spouses, partners, families and children where we live our lives. This long friendship made me lucky enough to read my knees bites, drafts of monies bites books along the way, yellowing pages still turnip and my files. I read them and i read them again last week. Why are you reading my books money said . I learn stuff i said. And i mean to tell you briefly some of the things that i have learned. Mulroneys first book was a biography of the photographer laura gulping. Laura guilt in and enduring grace published in 1986. It won a slew of awards and i dont have time to tell you all of them, but theres a story behind the book. Money abandoned her class whats in new haven and moved to fort worth to become the cure curator photographer at the museum there. Legend has it that her hiring was an accident. The interviewer confused her with another graduate student. True or not, the museum had a lucky break and she had a job offer but with a hitch. She needed to defend a dissertation proposal, and other words to be a beady before she could get this job so she dreamed up an idea. How about the french in the Mississippi Valley . She wrote it up in a couple of weeks, defended it and moved to texas. In fort worth, she worked her way through the extraordinary collections of the anna carter museum, publishing on texas photography and types of the mexican war. Which when laura gallup and left her estate to the museum, mulroney had an archive, a subject at, a chance to work out her conviction that photography was more than on a means to illustrate presented in attacks. Photography is an interpretive act she insists a primary source as crucial to history as the descriptive diary or a legal document. She wrote a book about gayle pin but she wanted her ph. D. Now i have a story that i have told marty just tells me its a legend and its wrong that she finish this book, a beautiful book about the photographer, came back to new haven, said heres my dissertation, and then in a brilliant stroke of reversed engineering, wrote a proposal to send it in and turn in the dissertation. But that she tells me isnt true, that she actually began the book, wrote a proposal. But i will still say this that it is probably the most elegant dissertation ever to come out of the yale History Department. She left the aim in carter to direct the at the Amherst College but continue to write on photography and a visual history of the American West, editing and contributing to a half dozen books, including the Award Winning oxford history of the American West with clyde miller and zach martin is always been a scholar heart, not enemies museum is administrator or a president of a learned society. She joins, the department of history at amherst and then finally princeton. Through all those museum years, she was working on a big book a photography in American West in the 19th century. Print the legend came out in 2002 it to swept up batch of prizes and impressed readers with essential contention that the conquest settlement and development of the American West could not be understood without reckoning with the Simultaneous Development of the history of photography. Money stopped this bold plane through all sorts of archives and through the big stories of the American West. No Surprise Research letter to work on the expeditions that mapped the western landscapes and the career of clarence king. Her account of kings life passing strange a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line, 2009 you which turns the biographical art that she learned when writing about the open. And the archival patients that she had immense mastered in print the legend. What animates passing strange though is the question of race. The color line that snakes its way through the post emancipation United States. Her own work a survey in a way of color. Line and the race and the archives of race shaped her extraordinary project, the wet face collaborative that she led on princeton and slavery. Maps, graphs, videos and stories on earth by her undergraduate researchers have left us with the campus changed by the materials they have found to record and represent the many roles of enslaved people and the history of that university. So let me end this intellectual wedding top by turning to las vegas is other industry until you one story about your president as a gambler. You wonder about this but it did happen. I went to see marty in santa fay. Her gift for friendship luring me just as she once upon a time to fort worth where we planted tulip bulbs. And worked again and santa fe. Come see me she insisted. Sure that the beauty of the southwest or what my wintry soul needed at the time. And we took ourselves on a gambling adventure to the Camel Rock Casino i think into suitcase. Back in those pretechnological days, we each invested 20 dollars in quarters and armed with a grubby plastic cups, spent the evening playing the slots. We amused ourselves for a few hours, our dutiful souls taming the wild world of gambling, and turning it it into an evening outing. But if money took no risks at the can see no floor, not so with their work which digs deep into the archives, links the field, teaches surprises it opens eyes. I tell you, read her work and you will learn stuff. So let me give the podium to this member of my imagined cohort, my sleepy classmate, a generous colleague and my brilliant friend and let you listen to the next iteration of her marvelous weed of the visual, the verbal of stories the play across history scale from the incident encounters to imperial schemes. So raise a toast of whatever is on your table to her top, seeing history and thinking about with photographs. clapping thank you van. When i first came to this meeting 40 years ago, i certainly never imagine standing up here. Fact i probably didnt much imagine still standing. But if intellectual curiosity and the sense of professional obligation brought me here in the first place, it is the Friendship Center that brought me back. So i just want to say at the outset, thanks to all of you, thank you all for making this such a welcoming and congenial intellectual hold for me. It is really been an honor to serve as your president. clapping now the french historian Emmanuel Lurie says there are two times of historians, parachutists, and chuckle hunters. The first look down from the sky, the latter snowfall round in the dirt. He didnt elaborate but we can infer what he said. The parachutist can see large patterns and attract the movement of events are peoples, pathogens or ideas across vast stretches of space and time. You need to be a parachutist to see how old world germs or animals will shape the new world. But you can miss things from up there to. From up high its hard to see the rhythms of daily life. From the Space Shuttle you might by a smoke from a volcano in iceland, the be hardpressed to understand the troubles that volcanic ash caused by people stuck in an airport in rome frantic about missing awe wedding or death at. Farewell conversely, those very local circumstances are what interest truffle hunters. A truffle hunter might not see how atmospheric currents dispersed of aquaponic ash above the italian peninsula, but she might learn something very interesting by eavesdropping on a conversation in the airport bar. So let me confess, im afraid of heights. By temperament, i am a truffle hunter and im not asserting this as a superior kind of historical practices, simply what i like to do. And with hindsight, i can see that this is the kind of historical practice that my own party peculiar career led me. When i began my career as a photographer curator, i invariably had to start with the thing itself. And over and over again, ive learned that small objects, photographs, can lead to big stories. Now long before the invention of photography in 1839, people in the western half of the north American Continent use visual means to make sense of their world. In petra gloves and high paintings with ceramic vessels and devotional art. But the settlement of the west as part of the United States largely coincides with the invention and spread of photography. The new american region and the new medium came of age together. And through photography Many Americans encountered the west for the first time. And photographs still shape our mental images of the west. In our minds i, we imagine California Gold miners, side how settlers, dust bowl farms. Nonetheless, as western historians, we have been more apt to use these photographs illustrations and to think about them as primary sources that can help us answer central questions about the western cast. And we let writers and scholars from other disciplines shape the contemporary conversations about how to understand photographs. So lets reclaim that turf. Lets ask from the perspective our own field how light historians think about photographs. As 19 century observers were quick to see off between photography in history and as a move towards a new focus between Scientific Method in the 19th century, photographs came to seem the perfect documents a new age of objective back. To the essayist oliver window homes among the mediums will study mediums, regarded photographs as most studied aides that actually preserved incidental details that might not of guns theoretically he wrote in 1859, a perfect photograph is absolutely inexhaustible. And with a nod to the west, he argued that the accidents of life, that photographs an infinite charm, on the ross western sentiment, in the champs of stretching across the court yards of damascus, wherever man lives with the decencys of civilization, you will find the close line. Who later, in 1888, the local surgeon George Francis addressed the society in western massachusetts on photography as well aid to local history. And a call for amateur photographers to aid the work of local historians. He exhorted them to make a system that systematic Photographic Survey of new englands farms, villages and developing industries. And he explained there can be no question that photography is the best method of securing these graphic records. It is by far the most accurate, the easiest and the cheapest of all methods known at the present day. More than any other graphic process he said, it was nearly free from error caused by the bias or prejudice of the operator. By 1918, jay Franklin Jameson one of the founders of the American Historical Society asian to put it this way. We dwell in an age of pros. The world cares last for eloquence than it did a generation ago. Since darwin, it is been no more possible for the aid to produce a crop of my colleagues initialize that it is possible for those who picture running horses to expel from their minds what they have learned from mr. More ridges photographs of animal locomotion. To jameson the position of darwins observations are edward stop action photographs of galloping horses provided the kind of evidence that historians needed for this new scientific history. And there were useful and adults to what jameson called the imaginative presentation of human life. That marked the historical writing of an earlier age. Now these 19th century commented nurse presume that historians of photographers had a lot in common and that what pound them together was a commitment to scientific observation and the neutral recording of facts. Now though we have course view these professions differently and we might observe that its a subjective observation of the world, not a purely objective one that makes photographers and historians kindred spirits. Now historians and photographers operate with very different tool kits. Theres no mistaking a pan for a camera but they make similar decisions about whether to reveal their presence, about how to frame their subject in time and space, about what to highlight and what to exclude. Nonetheless, we stand they stand fundamentally different relationships to their subjects. Historians are always looking back. Photographers are always picturing the present albeit and evanescent won the slips away the moment this is the foam is exposed. Throw to consider the similarities and differences in how historians and photographers observe and describe the world, lets focus on a single photograph. For sometime now ive been exploring the stories embedded in a photograph made for laramie indicative territory in 1868 by alexander gardner. On either side of an eye and identify girls and six man. All members of the Peace Commission sent west by congress to negotiate a treaty with various tribes on the northern plains. Gardner made picture as part of a series to that documents the commissioners work at the fort as well as the daily lives of the native peoples and next race families that live there. Ive pondered the challenge the gardeners made in making the photograph as opposed to those that i find a face in writing about it. I found that what he knew in contrast to what i know. He knew how hot it was on this early may day, weather records from the four dont start up for a few more months. He knew the sounds of these peoples voices, he knew what the men ate for breakfast. He knew these people. But as an historian, i can know far more about their lives than he did. I can watch them walk into this picture and i can follow them as they walk away out of the photographer site into their uncertain futures. But the tools of an historian i can uncover stories and connections here that neither the photographer nor the subjects could fully discern. I can know for example that the child whose name gardner didnt record is actually sophie who so and i can know that her uncle will become the Prime Minister of quebec. I can know the general william as harmony standing with military burning bearing second from the right led an army charge on the dakota village 13 years earlier that resulted in the murder of sophies half brother. I can know that ironies military raid indirectly led a woman and a french canadian man, to meet enter into a marriage that would allow us close to half a century sophies parents. I would know that her father is at the moment this picture is being made, employing general sentiment as an attorney to help him get federal compensation for property lost in indian raids. And i can know the generals and more, ostensibly risks misrepresenting the federal government here in negotiating payments to the assembled tribes will get a cut of that money himself if he can divert some of it to sophies father as compensation for his stolen horses. The point here is really not to highlight my historical knowledge at garners expense or to demonstrate the photographers and historians can have different needs for the same picture. I want to also argue that historians have a fundamentally different relationship to time the new photographers. Both of course can observe temporal change as part of a media experience. But historians look beyond the personal. In observing events across time is fundamental to their craft, to our craft. Historians can compress actions occurring across space and time and with the benefit of hindsight, they can recover pivotal moments and develop causal links between discreet events. And looking back, they can reconsider people or events deemed an interesting at the time but valuable in retrospect. Remember holmes unnamed photographer . He may have inadvertently captured those close lines of pikes peak but its up to the historian to explain whos close they are and how they got dirty, wash them and who run them out to dry. If i could walk out along the larvae river with gardner in his subjects, i would surely learn something new and interesting about them all. Still, its Historical Research that lets me know more about young sophies family, history than gardner does in 1868. And because i can see into her familys future as neither she nor garner, can i can know that her fathers lawsuits will remain unresolved when he dies more than 30 years later. I can also know that one of her sons, the first look or a person to attend law school will later presses grandfathers claims. Now even though in the digital area its harder to shape the old 19th century assumptions about the liberalism photography the first attracted historians to it as a new kind of historical document. Photographs seemed to offer an immediate glimpse of the past, no matter how much we know about vic tigers ability to manipulate a scene. But photographs are historical artifacts. They are not history itself. History is dynamic, fluid inherently about change overtime and photographs are static. But they their meanings change. In december of 1869 when general william tshirt man standing third from the left here thanked gardener for sending in copies of his forte laramies views, he highlighted the documentary value of the pictures. He wrote that many of them are beautiful pictures but ill give details of indian dress and physiology that will be valuable for sometime to come. When the daughter of a sketch artist connected to the Peace Commissioners described this photograph more than half a century after it was made, she spoke a bit more metaphorically as a ceremonial picture in the nature of a pledge to the future. On a 150th anniversary of 1868 for laramie treaty, gardeners images served as the markers of broken promises. Photographs have histories of their own. And historians need to pay attention, not just to the visual information they contain but to their context, theyre materiality and theyre shifting uses. Now every photograph is a moment seized from a continuum of flowing time and fixed for posterity. It focuses our attention on what we can see and it can be tempting, tempting to decide that something is important simply because we have a photograph of it. Civil war scholars note for example that the massive mortar dictator has become well known although it has little historical importance only because of several photographs made of it in the summer of 1864. And as western historians we might ask what stories do we emphasize, especially in textbooks because we cant visualize them with photographs. Conversely, what stories mom what we might overlook because there exists no photographs to anchor them in a particular time in place . Because we value the evidence we have at hand, we can be led to imagine that the moment fixed in the photographic image holds great explanatory power. But that is not always true. Photographs document consequences more readily than causes. They capture particular material subjects but not abstract ideas. They depict fleeting moments but they do not explain how they came about. Gardeners photograph of the six Peace Commissioner standing with the young girl at fort laramie for example cannot tell us anything about the tense negotiations between the assembled bands of sue and the federal Police Commissioner sent the force them onto a reservation. It cannot hands at the betrayal that will follow seven years later when the federal government ran eggs on their promise to make the black hills a permanent part of that newly formed reservation. And i cannot predict the moment in 2016 when the federal board of geographic names will take general harneys name will take his name off the highest peak in the black hills and rename the mountain after the dakota profit blackout. Nevertheless this photograph of seven people, the oldest wondering john adams administration, the youngest dying during frozen belts presidency, invites a scholar to discover what is there and what is now. The photographs certainly do me into the archives and thats where i found sophies parents and discovered the both of them came into four laramie in the aftermath of general harmonies attack of Little Hollow in 1855. Harneys actions set in motion the events that led them to a meet, mary and raise large family. Is frontier violence triggered their frontier love. The photograph alone does not tell that story but does leave me there. Over the past 50 years this photography has become an increasingly bitter quiz part of life, the media is a crease and become central to a host of new

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