Captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 thats the job for a historian. Most historians, if they think about photographs at all, focus on them as images not material objects and as illustrations rather than as primary sources that can and should themselves be the subject of historical analysis. Watch ken burns 1996 series on the west and Pay Attention to his treatment of the pueblo revolt of 1680. While he uses engravings of spaniards it to visual issize the story he relies on 19th and 20th century sorry gave away my story there, trying to highlight this picture here, he relies on 19th and 20th century photographs to depict the pueblo protagonists. This approach conveys an insidious image. European people change with time. One would never use images from two centuries later to depict them, but native peoples live on in an unchanging past, a photograph made 240 years later is just fine. We are susceptible to this historical use of photographs when we do not know better. I like to imagine that burns viewers realized that Motion Picture footage of a snake dance could not actually depict the pueblo revolt of 1680 but my students presumed they saw 17th century dancers performing in front of a movie camera and i know theyre not alone. To move beyond the critical use of photographs as illustration and engage them as primary source documents we need to give our students a greater familiarity of photographs with technologies and formats so they can better understand what photographs could and couldnt capture who had the wherewithal to make photographs, how they circulated, we need to help them with their familiar world of digital cameras as well and appreciate how revolutionary this technology is. The enlarged pool of digital picture takers is profoundly reshaping how the American West is now being photographed and how it will be understood through photographic evidence in the future. We also need to reiterate for our students the point ive made, photographic meaning is not fixed. Historians follow people and places, events and ideas, through time. That is the hallmark of our trade and we need to follow photographs through time too. We need to be aware that we exist at the tail end of a continuum of viewers who encountered any particular photograph and our needs for the images differ from theirs. Its hard, for example, to look at this 1872 washington, d. C. Studio portrait of the chief big foot without also visualizing the photograph of his frozen body, made in the immediate aftermath of the massacre at wounded knee 18 years later. Its hard to stare at a photograph of the Young Hawaiian school boy barack obama without also seeing who he will become. Photographs depict moments pregnant with possibilities, but by the time we look at them with our historians curiosity about the past, the range of possibilities has narrowed. The time captured in a photograph stands still, but for the historian it continues to unfold. So a photograph of the twin towers rising over Lower Manhattan cannot be the same kind of document it was before 2001. Now it took me he a long time to reckon with the shifting meanings of unchanging photographs. For years i worked on a collection of types of the mexicanamerican war, lost between 1847 and their rediscovery in 1981. The worlds first photographs of war and arguably the earliest examples of photo journalism in the world, they are astonishing artifacts each in the phrase of the age a mirror with a memory. This plate was there on a street more than 170 years ago when light bounced off of general wool and left a lasting impression on its sensitized surface. It offers an extraordinary kind of evidence, but in 1847, nobody cared. I finally had to reckon with these types in time, rather than through time, suspending my own personal interest in them. Despite their astonishing detail and attraction to me, these could not convey the kind of narrative drama that antibell lum americans expected from images the small bleak graveside of henry clay jr. , killed at the battle of buena vista in february 1847, could not compete in either narrative detail or visual appeal with Something Like this handcolored lithograph of his death issued by nathaniel career. The print artist here had tools akin to those that historians have. The print artist could look back with hindsight to compression drama to depict a noble and patriotic death. He could use printed words down at the bottom to describe with precision the content of his image and the typesist could do none of this. This leads us to larger stories of photographer and the ways in which americans struggle to understand this new medium. If photographs can help us uncover americas slow embrace of the medium, they can help us track when that attitude changed. In 1867, Alexander Gardner titled this photograph made for the kansas specific railway eastern division, westward the course of empire. A decision that points not just to the ubiquity of bishop barkleys phrase but to the ways in which americans could now read the meaning of a locomotive pointed west at the far end of a newly laid track. In the 20 years since the mexicanamerican war, the increasing number of photographs in the United States spurred by the invention of a new wet plate negative technology that allowed for the production of multiple paper prints had familiarized americans with these sorts of images. Now most photographs from the late 19th century west couldnt invoke the obvious met forecle vocab be blairry of gardners Railroad Scene but as photographers began producing paper prints they began using words to direct viewers readings of their pictures. Timothy sullivans photograph of arizona might seem to be little more than a scenic view, but the caption that was bound into the album with this picture explains that picture offers proof that white people can now enter the area because hostile apaches have been banished from their former home. So words and images together convey the point, the most important aspect of the picture is what you dont see. These photographic captions mark an innovation that has been rarely studied even by historians who favor literary evidence over the visual, but they remind us when we look at 19th century photographs as primary sources for our work, we must look at the image and assess the materiality of the photograph, but wes also need to read. Now, historians offer encounter photographs in places we call archives and the very term archive is a slippery one. We might usefully imagine a distinction between the archive and the archives. The former, the archive, is described by french theorists as more metaphorical meanings and the second to the brick and mortar places where records are stored. Though scholars like michelle and jacques have alerted us to the power relations inscribed in the archive, we might also be attentive to the ways in which power relationships are ascribed in the brick and mortar archives as well. The physical institutions that house large collections of historical photographs of the American West presevere the power inequities inherent in the collections they acquire and these are inequities that mirror those of western life, people with money and cameras and those without, and those between people who can refuse to be photographed and those who cannot, a vast category that might include subjects on reservations in prisons and Detention Centers and children. Photography is often called the democratic art. But just as not everyone had the wherewithal to make a photograph not every person or place received the same photographic attention. Economic interest dictated mid 19th century california would be better documented than new mexico territory, small towns better documented than the rural spaces of indian country. People with fixed residences pictured more than migrant workers. Government interests also shape the photographic record of the 19th century west. Photographers to the great federal surveys of the 1860s and 70s documented potential transportation routes and Natural Resources in service to the expansionist policies of the state. In washington, d. C. , studio photographers who made portraits of visiting indian leaders produced pictures that would be used to support the governments assimilationist policies. Collections of photographs thus contain particular structural biases even before they enter the brick and mortar archives that collect materials, and in these archives, whether they are academic, public or commercial operations, additional decisions get made about access, cataloging and preservation that further shape the possibility for a historians work. Now the digital turn. The digital turn presents too broad enormous challenges for historians who would use photographs. On the one hand the question of how to think about born digital photographs, a term used in opposition to analog photographs which are produced with chemical processes and possess a chemical form. On the other the question of how to think about digital archives, both those composed entirely of born digital materials and those created as older materials are converted to digital formats. Born digital photographs constitute virtually all of the photographs being made today. People made an estimated 1. 2 trillion digital photographs in 2017. One researcher estimates every two minutes we take as many photographs as the whole of humanity in the 19th century. This is way too many pictures for a researcher to reckon with, way too many to reckon with in any meaningful way. Even with help from Artificial Intelligence whose programmed interests are almost surely not the same as ours, its hard to imagine how to make effective use of such an enormous collection of digital images or assess the integrity of any individual image. Were in the midst of a tectonic shift here and it is hard to say how the emerging skepticism about the voracity of digital images will retroactively alter our fate in historical photographs. Even familiar photographs can be rendered unrecognizable in their digital iterations. The gardner photograph im writing about exists in several different digital archives sometimes adequately identified and sometimes not. In one commercial archive gardners name is completely eraced, replaced with a credit line that simply tracks the corporate ownership of this image. The website provides no location for the original and provides intellectual access to the picture with such decidedly unuseful subject headings as, teenager, group of men, land. It offers to sell you a copy of the picture, whose original is uncopyrighted for 499. Now, the integrity of a digital image presents one challenge and the integrity of a digital archive another. Digitalized archives tend to erase all records of their own construction. In a physical archive a patient person can plow through the boxes of a collection and presume theyve covered it all. Users of a digitalized archive are hard pressed to understand the relationship between what is online and whats in the real or figurative storage boxes. Online archives function as stand in for the physical archives, but the relationship is rarely clear. The digitalization of ald photographs, of course, has its virtues. It provides greater access to materials, minimizes the wear and tear on fragile pictures and promotes new ways of working with visual records. Often, at least in academic and institutional archives, the digital archives include enough meta data and physical description to let one make smart use of a digitalized photograph. But commercial archives generally include less data. They focus on the image, while ignoring the materiality of the photographic print and they push historians back to thinking about photographs as mere imstrations and make it difficult to engage them as physical objects or as primary sources that in and of themselves raise interesting historical questions. Commercial archives exercise forms of censorship. Ive been watching what happens since bill gates sold his image Licensing Company corbis to visual china group in 2016. The images of the tia man square protests of june 1989 were once readily accessible. Now, although the Chinese Corporation that bought them has an american outlet, they are not. Its a valuable lesson. Large commercial image archives reach viewers through mediated search engs that are subject to control. Unlike the researcher who might be turned away from a brick and mortar archive, online researchers might never know theyre missing a thing. Historians tempted by the digital need to be wary. Digital archives can impede historical research. What kind of historical source is a pixilated image whose creator we cant identify, form we cant discern, integrity we cant confirm and purpose we cant figure out. What kind of source is an archive whose scope we cant determine, structure we want see, political and economic aitions are concealed from view. The problems digital images aside, there exist billions of photographs pro causduced befor invention of digital photography. I cannot think of a comparable source for doing western american history, one so large and so little used. I fell into thinking about photographs 40 years ago more or less by chance and ive roamed far and wide since then, but now im back and i have to say the field is as wide open as it was when i began. New historical concerns compel us to ask new questions of that enormous corpus of western photographs and our new questions invest old objects with new meanings. Historical photographs now can help us understand Climate Change the mechanics of settler colonialism, the ins and outs of policy and borders and the federal government. They can lead us deep into Family History and community stories, legislative agendas and corporate policies. Historical photographs can also lead us back to troubles. The little stories that matter and the characters long forgotten. Alexander gardners photograph of seven people assembled at fort laramie on a spring day in 1868 has led me to people connected to the men we here. I encountered a slave woman whipped to death by a man you see here. The 1830s and the practice of s city. Ive met colonel tappens, cheyenne ward named mini in 1864 and her brief life helps us understand the webs of antislavery activists and indian policy reformers. Of course ive been led to sophie, whose first marriage to a white Civil War Veteran and second marriage to a mixed race man produced 13 children and whose life helps us uncover the diminishing opportunities available to mixed race families in the west as multiple color lines hardened in the wake of reconstruction collapse. Photographs help us answer hard questions, but they also help us expand the cast of characters who populate the west and make our stories richer and more inclusive. Over the past few decades ive had fun roaming the fields of western history and the west itself and exploring the photographic archives, the big metaphorcle ones and brick and mortar ones too. You know what it can feel lonely out there. We need more historians to care about photographs. Please, come join me. I promise its really a fun ride. Thank you so much. [ applause ] youre watching cspan 2, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Coming up shortly House Republicans will be holding a News Conference on their fall legislative agenda. Live coverage starts at 9 30 eastern. Were back and we will spend the next segment talking about right wing extremism in the United States and with us is author and university of massachusetts professor ari pearlinger, the author of american zellettes. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having me. Lets frame this conversation first