Behind those pictures to study and understand the American West, she has been studying and writing about photographs for 40 years, and argued that more historians should use photographic archives in their work. One minute past 12 30. Welcome, everyone. I have the happy task of introducing your president and my friend, marnie sandweiss. Im going to give you a version of what i have been describing as an intellectual wedding toast. We will present this room as a vegas wedding chapel and tell the story of marnie and me and marnies work, which got us all here. Let me start with the magical alchemy of graduate school. Us leadheaded thinkers turned into golden tongued scholars, writers, and teachers. Picture a process that works Something Like this. An Admissions Committee imagines a group of students as a cohort. The cohort becomes classmates. The classmates become colleagues. And once in a while, they become lifelong friends. So, colleagues, cohort, classmate, colleague, and that golden thing, a friend. I am cheating a little bit because marnie came to yale to study with Harold Lamarr a year after me, and she was in the History Department, and i was in that ragtag group in american studies. Not a cohort, exactly. 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. As a tribute to Howard Lamarr on friday afternoons. The slow drone of graduate students, our own included, listened to me. Marnie a lot better on watkins or timothy osullivan. We survived our basement years, scattered, and became colleagues, commiserating, solving problems for our students, for each other, and for the professional organizations that support our work. So, cohorts, classmates, colleagues, but for me, marnie 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 drafts of marnies books along the way, yellowing pages still turn up in my files. I read them and i read them again last week. Why are you reading my book, marnie says . I learned stuff, i said. Im going to tell you briefly some of the things i have learned. Marnies first book was a biography of the photographer laura gilpin, laura gilpin an enduring grace published in 1986. It won a slew of awards and i do not have time to tell you all of them. But theres a story. Marnie abandoned her classmates in new haven and moved to fort worth to become a curator of photography at the amon carter museum. Legend has it that should i tell you this . Legend has it 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, so she seems to have dreamed up an idea. How about the french in the Mississippi Valley . She wrote it up in a couple weeks defended it and moved to , texas. In fort worth, she published on texas photography. And the daguerreotypes of the mexican war. When laura gilpin left her estate to the museum, marnie had an archive, a subject, and a chance to work out her conviction that photography was more than a means to illustrate ideas presented in a text. Photography is an interpretive act, she insists, a primary source as crucial to history as a descriptive diary or a legal document. She wrote a book about gilpin, but she wanted her phd. I have a story that i have told, but marnie tells me thats the legend and it is wrong, that she finished this book, a beautiful book about the photographer, came back to new haven, and said, here is my dissertation, and did a brilliant stroke of reverse engineering, wrote a proposal, defended it, and turn in the dissertation. She told me she began the book, wrote the proposal, but i still say this. It is probably the most elegant dissertation ever to come out of the yale History Department. She left amon carter to direct an art museum at amherst, but continued to write about the visual history of the American West, editing and contributing to a half dozen books, including the awardwinning oxford history of the American West. But marnie has always been a scholar at heart, not a Museum Administrator or a president of a learned society. She joined the History Department at princeton. Through all those museum years, she was working on a big book on photography and the American West in the 19th century. Print the legend came out in 2002. It too swept up a batch of prizes and impressed readers with its central contention that 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. Marnie stalked this bold claim through all sorts of archives and through the big stories of the American West. No surprise, research on photography led her to work on the expeditions that mapped the western landscapes, and to the career of clarence king. Her accounts of kings life, passing strange a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line, 2009, returns to the biographical art she learned when writing about gilpin. And the archival patients she had mastered. What animates passing strange, though, is race, the color line that snakes its way through the postemancipation United States. Her own work, in a way, a survey of that color line. And a race and the archives of project, theer webbased collaborative that she led on princeton and slavery. Maps, graphs, videos, left us with a campus changed by the materials they have found to record and represent the many roles of enslaved people in the history of that university. Let me end this intellectual wedding toast by turning to las vegass other industry and tell you one story about your president as a gambler. You wonder about this. I went to see marnie in santa fe. It worked again in santa fe come see me, she insisted, sure you one story about your [no audio] we invested 20 in quarters and, armed with our grubby plastic cups, spent the evening playing slots. We amused ourselves for a few hours, our dutiful souls taming the world of gambling and turning it into an evening outing. But if marnie took no risks at the casino floor, not so with her work, which teaches the surprises and 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, my generous colleague, and my brilliant friend, and let you listen to the next iteration of her marvelous weave of the visual, the verbal, of stories that play across history, from the intimate encounters to the imperial schemes. Raise a toast of whatever is on your table to her talk seeing history thinking about and with photographs. [applause] prof. Sandweiss thank you, ann. When i first came to this meeting 40 years ago, i never imagined standing up here. In fact, i probably did not much imagine still standing. But if intellectual curiosity brought me here in the first place, it is the friendships that have brought me back here. I want to say at the outset, thanks to all of you. Thank you all for making this such a continuing intellectual a welcoming and congenial intellectual home for me. It has been an honor to serve as your president. [applause] prof. Sandweiss now, the french historian once said there were two kinds of historians parachutists and truffle hunters. Sky, the flow in the letter snuffle in the dirt. He did not elaborate, but we can infer what he meant. The parachutist can see large patterns and track the movement of events, people, pathogens, and ideas across vast stretches of space and time. You need to be a parachutist to see how old world germs or animals reshape the new world, but you can miss things from up there too. From up high, its hard to see the rhythms of daily life. From the space shuttle, you might spy a smoke plume from a volcano in iceland, but you would be hardpressed to understand the trouble of volcanic ash for people in rome, frantic about missing a wedding. Those very local what interestare truffle hunters. A truffle hunter might not see how atmospheric currents disperse volcanic ash above the italian peninsula, but she might learn something really interesting by eavesdropping on a conversation in the airport bar. Let me confess, i am afraid of heights. By temperament, i am a travel i am a truffle hunter. I am not asserting this as a superior historical practice. It simply what i like to do. With hindsight, i can see that this is the kind of historical practice to which my own peculiar career led me. When i began my career as a photography curator, i invariably had to start with the thing itself. And over and over again, i have learned that small objects photographs can lead to big stories. Long before the invention of photography in 1839, people in the western half of the north American Continent used visual means to make sense of their word, in petroglyphs and paintings with ceramic vessels and devotional art. But the settlement of the west as a part of the United States largely coincides with the invention and spread of photography. The new american mead american region and the new medium came of age together, and through photography, Many Americans encountered the west for the first time. Photographs still shaped our mental images of the west. Eye, we imagine California Gold miners, settlers, dustbowl farms. Nonetheless, as western historians, we have been more apt to use these photographs as illustrations than to think about them as primary sources that can help us answer central questions about the western past. We have 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 of our own field, how might historians think about and with photographs . 19th century observers were fast to see a connection between photography and history, and as the historical profession moved toward a new focus on the Scientific Method in the late 19th century, photographs seemed to be the perfect documents for this new age of objective fact. The essayist Oliver Wendell holmes, among the mediums most astute early critics, regarded photographs as historical aids that accidentally preserve the incidental details that might not have interested contemporary observers. 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 lent photographs an infinite charm. On the rawest western settlement and the oldest eastern city, in the myths of the shanties at pikes peak and stretching across the courtyards of damascus, wherever man lives with any of the decencies of civilization, you will find the clothesline. Later, in 1888, the local surgeon George Francis addressed the American Antiquarian Society in worcester, massachusetts, on photography as an aid to local history, and called on amateur photographers to aid the work of future historians. He exhorted them to make a systematic Photographic Survey of new englands developing industries, farms, and villages, 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 1902, franklin jamison, one of the president s of the Historical Association could put it this way we dwell in an age of prose. The world cares less for eloquence than it did a generation ago. Since darwin, it has been no more possible to produce a crop of mcauleys than for those who picture running horses to expel from their minds what they have learned from photographs about animal locomotion. To jamison, the precision of darwins observations and the photographs of galloping horses provided the evidence that historians needed for this new scientific history. And they were useful antidotes to what jamison called the imaginative presentations of human life that were documented in an earlier age. What bound them together was a commitment to scientific observation and the neutral recording of fact. Now, though, we view these professions differently, and we might observe it is the subjective observation of the world, not a purely objective one, that makes photographers and historians kindred spirits. Historians and photographers operate with different toolkits. There is no mistaking a pen 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, they stand in fundamentally different relationships to their subjects. Historians are always looking back. Photographers, of course, are always picturing a present, albeit an evanescent one that slips away the moment a sensitized film is exposed. So to consider the similarities and differences in how historians and photographers describe the world, lets focus on a photograph. For some time, i have been exploring the stories embedded in a photograph made at fort laramie in the dakota territory by Alexander Gardner. On either side of an identified of an identified girl stands six men, members of the Peace Commission to negotiate a treaty with various tribes on the northern plains. Gardner made the picture as part of a series that documents the work at the fort, as well as the daily lives of the native peoples and mixedrace families that lived there. I pondered the challenges gardner faced in making the photograph, as opposed to those i faced in writing about it. I thought about what he knew in contrast to what i know. He knew how hot it was on this early may day. The weather records 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 a 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 a photographers sight, into their uncertain futures. With the tools of an historian, i can uncover connections that neither the photographer nor the subjects could fully discern. I can know that the child, whose name he did not record, was sophie museo, and i can know that her uncle would become the Prime Minister of quebec. I can know that there was an army charge on a lakota village 13 years earlier, that resulted in the murder of sophies halfbrother. I can know that the raid indirectly led to a marriage that would last to close to half a century and become sophies parents. I can know that her father is, at the moment this picture is being made, employing john b sanborn, standing to the right of sophie, as an attorney to get federal compensation for property lost in indian raids, and i can know that general sanborn, ostensibly representing the federal government 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 not to highlight my historical knowledge or to demonstrate that photographers and historians can have different needs for the same picture. I want to argue that historians have a fundamentally different relationship to time than photographers do. Both, of course, can observe temporal change as a part of the immediate experience, but historians look beyond the personal, and 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 causal links between discrete events. And looking back, they can reconsider people or events deemed uninteresting at the time, but valuable in retrospect. Remember holmess unnamed photographer . He might have inadvertently captured those clotheslines at pikes peak, but its up to the historian to explain whose clothes they were, and who washed them and hung them out to dry. If i could walk out along the Laramie River with gardner and his subjects, i would surely learn something new and interesting about them all. Still, it is 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 gardner can, i can know her fathers lawsuits will remain unresolved when he dies 30 years later, and i can know that one of her sons will later press his grandfathers claims. Even in the digital era, it is hard to shake assumptions about the literalism of photography that first attracted historians to it as a new kind of historical document. Photographs seemed to offer an unmediated glimpse of the past. No matter how much we know about a photographers ability to manipulate the scene. But photographs are historical artifacts. They are not history itself. History is dynamic, fluid, inherently about change over time. And photographs are static. But their meanings change. In december of 1869, when general william t sherman, standing third from the left, thanked gardner for sending him copies of his fort laramie views, he highlighted the documentary value of the pictures, writing that many of them are beautiful pictures, but ill give the tales of indian grass and physiognomy that will be valuable for some time 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 of it more metaphorically as a ceremonial picture in the nature of a pledge to the future. On the 150th anniversary of the 1868 fort laramie treaty, gardners 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 materiality, and , shifting uses. Every photograph is a moment seized from the continuum of flowing time and fixed for posterity. It focuses our attention on what we can see, and it can be tempting to decide something is important simply because we have a photograph of it. Civil war scholars note, for example, that the dictator has become wellknown, even though it has little historical importance only because of several photographs made during the summer of 1864. As western historians, we might ask what stories do we emphasize . Especially in textbooks . Because we can visualize them with photographs. Conversely, what stories might we overlook because there exists no photographs to anchor them in a particular time and place . Because we value the evidence we have at hand, we can be led to imagine the moment fixed to 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. Gardners photograph of the six Peace Commissioners standing with the young girl at fort laramie, for example, cannot tell us anything about the tense negotiations between the sioux and federal Peace Commissioners sent to force them on a reservation. It cannot hint at the betrayal that will follow seven years later when the federal government reneges on its promise to make the black hills a permanent part of the reservation. It cannot predict the moment in 2016 when the federal board of geographic names will take general harneys name off the highest peak in the black hills and rename the mountain after the lakota prophet black elk. Nonetheless, this photograph of seven people, the oldest born during john adams administration, the youngest dying during Franklin Roosevelts presidency, invites the historian in to understand what is there and explore what is not. The photograph certainly drew me into the archives, and that is where i found sophies parents and discovered both of them came into fort laramie in the aftermath of general harneys attack on little thunders camp at ash follow in 1855. Follow in 1855. Harneys actions set in motion the events that led them to meet mary and raise a large family. His frontier violence triggered their frontier love. The photograph alone does not tell that story. But it does lead me there. Over the past 50 years, as photography has become an increasingly ubiquitous part of modern life, the medium has drawn increasing attention from critics and become central to a host of disciplinary subfields , including visual anthropology, media studies, visual culture, visual studies, but these fields all focus largely on the analysis of contemporary images, not historical ones. Even in fields like memory studies, where historical images can play a central role, the place of photographs remains unexplored. Photographs can be handmade to an be handmades handmaids to what we call collective memory, a deeply felt set of convictions resistant to change. Ids ofan also be handma history, which employs a more skeptical and critical view of the past. Photographs are not inherently one thing or the other. They derive their meanings from the ways we use them. American textbooks, for example, have long celebrated the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad with photographs like east and west shaking hands, which depicts the celebrants of the golden spikes ceremony of 1869, but excludes the chinese laborers who made who laid most of the tracks from california east to utah. In the late 19th century, andrew j. Russells iconic picture supported the evolving collective memory of the Transcontinental Railroad as a triumph of american industry. In recent years, however, as historians turn away from the triumphalist narrative, the photograph finds a new place in historical writing. Once valued as evidence of the nations technological prowess, the photograph now has value because of the very exclusion of the Chinese Workers revealing to us so much about contemporary racial thought. Historical photographs shape our more personal reckoning of the western past as well. I first saw yellowstone through 19th century photographs, and i anticipated my first visit would trigger a rush of familiarity. It did, but i was shocked. The place had green trees and blue skies. I had no idea. These old 1870s photographs had made the place recognizable to me. Eir the but th monochrome tones had also made the 19thcentury west seem unduly remote from my own experience. Gardners photographic subjects at fort laramie experience their world in color. I need to remember that. Their world was not so far away from mine as some might imagine. My mother reminds me that she was alive during sophie moussas lifetime. Sophie stands in this picture with a man born before lewis and clark headed west. The history of the American West is short indeed. I stand just two degrees of separation, two lifetimes from general harney, a military man with a violent temper, who i actually do not want to meet. Writing about photographs in 1980, the french critic Roland Barthes described an element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. I will concede, the visceral response to a photograph can spark a good novel or a good film. But imaginative responses are not the same as historical responses. Imaginative responses favor feeling over analytic thought. They draw attention back to the viewer and away from the photograph itself. Imagine a historians punctum, . Historians and nonhistorians alike might gaze with curiosity at the child whom gardner left unidentified in the photograph. She commands attention because she looks different from the men who stand by her, by virtue of her gender, size, age, and ethnicity. And because she meets the cameras gaze with an unflinching calm. But the historian needs to push beyond that initial curiosity to tackle the who, what, why, where, when, and how of it all. It is the historians task to figure out who the child is and resist the impulse to view her as an emblem or metaphor. And to instead establish her as a person with a rich history of her own. There is nothing wrong with historical empathy, but as historians, we need to bolster our empathy with research. Sophie never saw gardners picture of her. His photographs did not circulate back to indian country. But emerging academic conversations about visual sovereignty, representational jurisdiction, and indigenous media remind us that native peoples have long been involved in the production, interpretation, and circulation of visual images. And that the needs of native subjects and nonnative photographers dont always converge. In the early 1980s, an Indian School in south dakota interviewed local sioux about ancestors who had been photographed over a century earlier. The 1877 government catalog described associated tribal groups as people who had made more substantial progress in civilization, many of them having permanently discarded the indian habits and dress. But a century later, Community Members recalled their relatives differently. Struck by who you see on the noht, they explain, was assimilationist. Similarly, smutty bear on the left was an expert hunter who resisted federal policy. These family stories shift the meaning of 19th century portraits. Photographs tossed out into the world as evidence of a vanishing race get pulled back in as emblems of family pride. Photographs may be stable objects but they do have , unstable meanings. And tracking the shifting work they perform over time and in different contexts, that is 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 primary sources that can and should themselves be the subject of historical analysis. Watch ken burns 1996 series on the west. Pay attention to its treatment of the pueblo revolt of 1680. While he carefully uses 17th and 18th century engravings of spaniards to visualize his story, he relies on 19th and 20th century sorry i gave away my story. I was 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 ahistorical use of photographs when we do not know better. I like to imagine that burns viewers realize that Motion Picture footage of a snake dance could not actually depict the pueblo revolt of 1680. But my students presume they saw 17thcentury dancers performing in front of a movie camera. I know they are not alone. To move beyond the uncritical use of photographs as illustrations and engage them as primary source documents, we need to give our digital students a greater familiarity with photographic technologies and formats, so they can better understand what photographs could and could not capture, who had the wherewithal to make photographs, how photographs circulated. We need to help them conceptualize the familiar world of digital cameras and help them appreciate how revolutionary this technology is. The enlarged pool of digital picturetakers is profoundly shaping 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 i just made. Photographic meaning is not fixed. Historians follow people and places, events and ideas through , time. That is the hallmark of our trade. We need to follow photographs through time too. We need to be aware that we exist at a tail end of a continuum of viewers who have encountered any particular photograph, and that our needs from the images differs from theirs. It is hard to look at this 1872 washington, d. C. , studio portrait of chief bigfoot without also visualizing the photograph of his frozen body made in the immediate aftermath of the massacre at wounded knee. It is hard to stare at a photograph of the Young Hawaiian schoolboy, 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. A photograph of the twin towers rising over Lower Manhattan cannot be the same kind of document it was before 2001. It took me a long time to reckon with the shifting meanings of unchanging photograph. Photographs. For years, i worked on a oflection of daguerreotypes the mexicanamerican war between 1847 and the rediscovery in 1981. The worlds first photographs of war, and arguably the earliest examples of photojournalism 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 saltillo street more than 170 years ago, when light bounced off and left a lasting impression on the sensitized surface. It offers an extraordinary kind of evidence. But in 1847, nobody cared. I finally had to reckon with these daguerreotypes in time, rather than through time, suspending my own personal interest in them, because despite their astonishing detail, these daguerreotypes could not convey the kind of narrative drama they expected from visual images. The small daguerreotype of the bleak gravesite of henry clay jr. , killed at the battle of buena vista, could not compete in either narrative detail or visual appeal with Something Like this hand colored lithograph of his death. The print artist here had tools akin to those that historians have. The print artist could look back with hindsight to compress time, invent drama, and focus on a decisive moment to depict a noble and patriotic death. He could use printed words at the bottom to describe with precision the content of his image. The daguerreotype could do none of this. These long, unseen daguerreotypes lead us to larger stories about the early reception of photography in the ways in which american struggled to understand this new medium. But if photographs can help us uncover americans slow embrace of the medium, they could also help us track when the attitude changed. In 1867, Alexander Gardner titled this photograph westward the course of empire. A decision that points not just to the ubiquity of the 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 negative technology that allowed for the production of multiple paper prints, had familiarized americans with these sorts of images. Most photographs in the late 19th century west could not invoke the obvious metaphorical vocabulary of gardners railroad scene. But in the late 1850s, as photographers began producing paper prints, they began using words to direct viewers readings of their pictures. Timothy osullivans photograph in the Sierra Blanca range, arizona, might seem to be a little bit more of a scenic view. But the caption explains the picture offers proof that white people can now enter the area because hostile apaches have been banished from their former home. Words and images together convey the point. The most important aspect of the picture is what you dont see. As these photographic captions merck in innovation that is really studied. These photographic captions mark an innovation that is 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 we also need to read. Now, historians often encounter photographs in places we call archives. And the very term archive is a slippery one. And we might usefully imagine a distinction between the archive and the archives. The former, the archive, is described by french theorists, has more metaphorical meanings. The second refers to the brick and mortar places where they are described and stored. As scholars like Michel Foucault derrida derrida jock to the powerred us relations described in the archive, we might also be attentive to the ways in which power relationships are inscribed in the brickandmortar archives as well. The physical institutions that house large collections of historical photographs of the American West preserve the power inequities inherent in the collections they acquire. These are inequities that mirror those of western american life, including those between 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 those in reservations, prisons, detention centers, and even 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 kind of photographic attention. Economic interest dictated that mid19th century california , for example, would be better documented than the new mexico territory small towns better , documented than more rural territory,ndian people with fixed residences pictured more than migrant workers. Government interests also shape the photographic record of the 19th century west. Photographers appended to the great federal surveys of the 1860s and 1870s and documented 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 brickandmortar archives that collect materials. 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 an historians work. The digital turn, the digital turn presents two broad and 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 physical and material form. On the other, there is the question of how to figure out how to think about digital archives. Both those composed entirely of digitalborn 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 that 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 in any meaningful way. Even with help from artificial intelligence, whose programmed interests are not the same as ours, it is hard to imagine how to make effective use of such an enormous collection of digital images, or assess the integrity of any individual image. We are in the midst of a tectonic shift here, and it is hard to say how the emerging skepticism about the veracity of digital images will retroactively alter our faith in historical photographs. Even familiar photographs can be rendered intellectually unrecognizable in digital iterations. The gardner photograph i am writing about exists in several different digital archives, sometimes adequately identified and sometimes not. In one commercial archive, the name is completely erased, replaced with a credit line that simply tracks the corporate ownership of this image. The website provides no location for the original. It provides intellectual access to the picture with decidedly unuseful subject headings as teenager, group of men, land. [laughter] prof. Sandweiss and it offers to sell you a copy of the picture, whose original is uncopyrighted, for 499. The integrity of a digital image presents one challenge. The integrity of a digital archive another. Digitized archives tend to erase all records of their own construction. In a physical archive, a patient person can plow through the boxes of a particular collection and presume they have covered it all. But users of a digital archive, a digitized archive, are hardpressed to understand the relationship between what is online and what is in the real or figurative storage boxes. Online archives function as metanyms, standins for the physical archives. But the relationship is rarely clear. The digitization of old 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 digital records. Often, at least in academic and institutional archives, the digital archives do include enough metadata to let one make smart use of a digitized photograph. 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 illustrations, and make it difficult to engage them as physical objects or as primary sources that in and of themselves raise historical questions. Commercial archives also exercise invisible forms of censorship. I have been watching what happens since bill gates sold his image Licensing Company to visual china group in january 2016. The images of the Tiananmen Square protests were once readily accessible. Now, although the Chinese Corporation that bought them has an american outlet, they are not. It is a valuable lesson. Large commercial image archives reach viewers through mediated Search Engines that are subject to censorship and control. And unlike the prospective researcher who might be turned away from a brickandmortar archive, online researchers might never know they are missing a thing. Some historians tempted by the digital turn need to be wary. Digital archives, especially commercial ones, can actually impede Historical Research. What kind of historical source is a pixelated image whose creator we cant identify, whose original form we cannot discern, whose integrity we cant confirm, and whose purpose we cant figure out . What kind of source is an archive whose scope we cannot determine, whos a we cannot see, whose structure we cannot see, whose political and economic ambitions are concealed from view . The problems of digital images aside, there exists billions of photographs produced before the invention of digital photography, with more made in the western United States than any scholar could examine in a lifetime. 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. I have roamed far and wide since then, but now i am 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 can help us understand climate change, the mechanics of colonialism, the ins and outs of immigration policy, the policing of national borders, and the assimilationist projects of the federal government. They can lead us deep into family histories and community stories, into legislative agendas and corporate policies. But historical photographs can also lead us back to trouble. Truffles, the little stories that matter, and to characters long forgotten. Alexander gardners photograph of seven people assembled at fort laramie on a midspring day in 1868 has led me to believe people to connected to the men we see here. And so i encountered an enslaved woman named hannah, who was whipped to death by general harney, and hannahs life has led me to st. Louis and the practice of slavery in the gateway city. I have met a young cheyenne ward of a colonel, and her brief life helped us understand a tangled web of antislavery activists and indian policy reformers. Of course, i have been led to sophie, whose first marriage to a white Civil War Veteran and second marriage to a mixedrace lakota man produced 13 children. And whose life helps us uncover the diminishing opportunities available to mixedrace families in the west as multiple color lines hardened in the wake of reconstructions collapse. Reconstruction costs collapse. Photographs help us answer hard questions, but they also help us cast of characters who populate the west and make our stories richer and more inclusive. Over the past few decades, i have had fun roaming the fields of western history and the west itself, and exploring the photographic archives. The big metaphorical ones and the brick and mortar ones, too. It can feel lonely out there. We need more historians to care about photographs. Please, come join me. I promise it is really a fun ride. Thank you so much. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] American History tv is on social media. Follow us at cspan history. Sunday, on american artifacts, learn about the early history of mobile, alabama, and visit africa town, a National Historical landmark neighborhood founded by former slaves captured on a ship. Here is a preview. We are entering africa town now. When the 13th amendment was passed, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, but when it did it abolished slavery throughout the United States. When that happened, most of the shipiduals that was on the came back to this area. They said it, if we could get back to where we got off of that ship, we could get home. They brought their customs, their culture to this community and they said, this is our africa town. That is how it got its name. It is part of mobile. It is about a 12. 5 square mile area. They ended up staying in this community. I will tell you, i stopped right here because about 18 months ago one of our local journalists, a guy by the name of ben, was out in our delta looking for the ship and fishing. January so the tide was low. He saw a boat sticking up and he said i think that is the cl otilda. When he said, this is it. We got attention from all over the world. National geographic picked up the story. They sent him one of their lead editors. He came in and in a short. Of time they said, no, it is not the clotilda. The community was awarded a grant. That grant established a welcome center. And it could be right where we are today. That time, National Geographic also financed nine to go to come into mobile into our delta. Our delta is the second largest in the u. S. , absolutely beautiful. And they were out there for two weeks for 14 hours a day looking for the ship. Said we foundhey 10 ships. The identified one, the tuscaloosa. Toy said we are going present a comprehensive report to the community in an open meeting, but not today. They did ultimately. They came back nine months later and said we found the clotilda. It is 25 feet underwater. Not sure we can bring it up. It might disintegrate. That is to be determined. They have engineers trying to determine if they can bring it up. They did bring up some artifacts, but the most profound thing that took place was the fact that they validated that that was the clotilda. Fourth, fifth generation descendents that live in the community. They found confirmation that there is the ship became overrun. On. He ship they came over of next, Cornell University history professor lawrence describes how the