Photographs and the Practice of History by Edwards Elizabeth;

Author:Edwards, Elizabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

6

Context

Statements are compared with each other without regard to their history and without considering that they might belong to different historical strata.1

Historians excel at context. It is one of the major commonplaces of their practice and a core methodology. They make continual judgements about the conditions in which their evidence works to illuminate happenings, effects, the subjectivities of actants and so forth. Their practice is balanced between their sources and context as the very conditions of textual, and here photographic, production. Any inscription from the past will be subject to interpretation and shifts of meaning. It was ever thus, and the construction of context is a key site of both interpretations and shifts. But, while it is a truism that readings change in accord with both the contexts applied and the contexts of reading itself, it remains that context is also a layer of historical representation and meaning making, entangled with questions of source criticism and the like. If context is a judgement of interpretative appropriateness, photographs’ complex contextual demands simultaneously highlight both the process of contextualization itself, and the photograph’s fragmenting and temporally fluid propensities. This, and the challenges it presents must preclude, I suggest, a simple recourse to context as an explanatory system.

The word context comes from the Latin contextus, to join together. Context ‘joins up’ historical sources with their fields of origination and with their fields of action – the multiple threads that connect things. So historians search out and assess the interconnectedness of facts and interpretative resources available, in order to produce a careful, perceptive structure that validates and authorizes their source material and their accounts of the past as robust and credible. At the same time, while there are of course, regrettably, ways to wriggle round this, rigorously applied disciplinary ideas of context are there to put a check on historians violating their sources, including photographs, in service of eccentric or aberrant interpretations. After all, what a document might say and how the historian writes about it are not the same thing.

But context is also a noun. It implies a thing, something static (rather like photographs in fact), a stilling or holding of connections. This might seem a simple and obvious point about something we do every day when we ‘do’ history of any sort. It is second nature to us. But second ‘nature’ slips into ‘naturalized’ as photographs, and indeed as other sources, attach themselves to unconscious patterns of recognition. When combined with the ‘naturalistic’ inscription of photographs, this is too often critically invisible. We need to think about it though because constructing a context can too easily be grounded in assumptions, rather than the questions it raises.

The origin and shape of such mantras as ‘being seen in context’ also reveal much about the relationship between photographs and history and the assumed values of historical practice. The idea that ‘photographs have to be seen in context’ has become forceful however, in a way that is not heard as continually and explicitly in relation to other historical sources, even though it applies equally.

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