A Faculty Seminar on Writing and Teaching History and Using Pictures:

One: Pictures and History by Jonathan Prude

Pictures are scarcely an unfamiliar element of history books. I ran across illustrated historical scholarship even when I was in graduate school training to be a wooden-headed, empirically-minded American social historian. The chronicles and narratives published in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries that I variously consulted in the runup to my dissertation were often garnished with prints. And the more up-to-date social histories I read through likewise frequently contained fair assortments of graphics. Thus, David Rothman’s well known 1971 study of 19th century American penitentiaries, insane asylums, and poor houses (Discovery of the Asylum) used prints of the institutions he discussed. So too, many of the investigations into post-Revolutionary slavery I and my fellow Ph.D. students examined included the 1798 drawing of a Virginia plantation by the British traveler and architect Benjamin LaTrobe (see accompanying Figure). And the book on antebellum industrialization spawned by my doctoral work, while devoid of interior illustrations, at least boasted cover imagery treating textile mills.

More recently, though, my interests have shifted in ways that have led me to rethink the use of pictorial representation in historical scholarship. My project these days deals with what I call the “appearance” of American working people from the Revolution to World War I. In the conceptual context I’ve developed, the “appearance” of laboring sorts is best understood as a relationship between how these individuals depicted and presented themselves visually and how they were observed and depicted by others, with the thought this relationship importantly reflected and affected the meanings of class. How did this project cause me to reconsider how graphics should be used? First, I determined I would need a lot of pictures to tell my story. After all, how better bring home to readers what working people looked like in past times than through pictures. But then, second, I decided it would not be enough to freight my manuscript with images and leave it at that. Because I realized that the way I and other social historians had conventionally marshalled pictures had been merely to illustrate--that is, merely to exemplify--points we were already specifying in our work on the basis of other data. Rothman’s talking about asylums in the early 1800s: here’s a picture of a penitentiary from that era; other historians are talking about slaves or factories: here’s LaTrobe’s drawing or some images of mills. But this approach was not sufficient for the undertaking I was now essaying. For if I was going to deal with the interactions of appearance, with appearance as interaction, then representations from the years I was considering surely had to be reckoned expressive of that dynamic. Indeed, I found there were different kinds of representations I needed to explore from this perspective. Many were texts: reform tracts, for example, and journalistic articles, theatrical scripts and travel narratives. All these had to be considered not just as illuminating what was otherwise asserted on my page but as intrinsic to the processes my pages were trying to explicate. All these, in other words, had to be mined for documentary information about how working people looked and, simultaneously, construed as demonstrating, in particular ways, intersections between how laboring people were regarded and how they regarded themselves.

And pictures had to be dealt with from the same angle. Which is to say I had to find ways to use pictures that harvested their affirming specification of laborers’ visuality (what this or that laborer wore, for instance) but remained attentive to the pictures’ own visual presence: to why given images ended up depicting workers in a given manner. In sum, I had to find ways of using pictures that did not ignore their “cultural work,” and--importantly--that did not overlook how this “work” of images might vary depending on (for example) the kind of laborer imaged and the kind of picture and picture-maker involved, or again--also importantly--that would compare what pictures did as pictures with the mediations effected by other representations of laboring folk. Producing a book slated to contain 200 images, I found myself, paradoxically, committed to avoid treating any of them as merely “illustrations.”

In a sense, all this can be taken as little more than the well-grooved and au courant habits of historicism. But applying such a viewpoint consistently across a range of sources, and especially applying it as vigorously to pictures as to texts--this, I concluded, might well be a departure. And since it was not immediately obvious exactly how I should proceed, I searched for models. A number of more or less modern history books have employed pictures differently from the customary practices of contemporary social historians. Have any of these pointed the way? There are, for example, volumes fairly overflowing with images. Some are textbooks designed for high school and college survey courses. But others--like coffee table volumes on American factories or Schnapper’s overview of American labor history--bear at least proximately on my topic. For the most part, though, these works rarely go beyond heavily illustrated writings that pay little if any attention to the import of pictures in their own right. Conversely, of course, there are studies that do just that. Art history monographs and histories of photography typically surround graphics with dense discussions of their formal pictorial characteristics and stylistic contexts. The difficulty here, however, is that these works generally only discuss pictures rather than (as I wished to do) consider pictures in concert with other representations and amidst broader narrative themes.

Several further models have emerged along the way. One that I found intriguing is tucked within Bernard Bailyn’s recent (1986) Voyagers to the West, the first volume of his massive projected inquiry into The Peopling of British North America. What caught my eye here is Bailyn’s effort to give readers a strengthened glimpse of what ordinary colonists looked like by having a modern artist draft pictures based on 18th century ads describing runaway servants and slaves. This is illustration--but with a difference. For it harnesses pictures not simply to ratify texts but truly to animate them. Another interesting possibility I came upon was John Kouwenhoven’s technique (evinced, for example, in his 1953 Columbia Historical Portrait of New York) of using running headers and extensive captions to tell his story largely via pictures. And I’ve also been drawn to Simon Schama’s method, demonstrated to impressive effect in The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), of sprinkling dozens of images through his chapters, captioning them only minimally, but braiding them thoroughly into the flow of his written analysis.
Whatever their value, however, the approaches of Bailyn, Kouwenhoven, and Schama do not entirely fill the bill. In Bailyn’s case, an important feature of colonial runaway ads was precisely that in their own time they lacked the aid of mimetic images, so that supplying such graphics today constitutes a palpably anachronistic injection of pictorial materials. And for their part both Kouwenhoven and Schama are less persistently explicit than I might wish about the way pictures, as distinct from other representations, transmitted their messages.

With all this in mind, how, in fact, have I proceeded? What I’ve come up with involves several overlapping strategies. First, and contrary to Bailyn, I’ve limited myself mainly to graphics from the years I’m exploring and I’ve sought to parallel students of imagery in acknowledging the features of these images judged as specific pictorial artifacts. Hence with respect to the LaTrobe drawing cited earlier, I’m careful to remark that it was a drawing (not, for example, an engraving), that it implied picturesque aesthetic inclinations popular in the early 1800s as well as the interests of a traveler, and (what’s also relevant) that it likely had little circulation in LaTrobe’s own lifetime. Second, and beyond attending to issues like authorship and form, style and audience, I strive to fuse sensitivity to a given graphic’s viewpoint with alertness to what a picture can tell us substantively about the visual imprint left by workers. So my handling of LaTrobe’s drawing does not omit noting its suggestions about the attire of slave women in early national Virginia.

And finally, I devote time and energy to playing pictures off against both one another and other representations and, subsequently, to extracting lessons from the resulting comparisons. Thus, the demeaning and racially tinged implications of toiling under supervision in late 18th and early 19th century America is, I think, tellingly revealed by the fact that while LaTrobe includes an overseer perched prominently (indeed with even ironic exaggeration) over black slaves, other sources from these same years tend to avoid displaying free white workers saddled with supervision. At the same time, and staying for the moment in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it surely discloses something significant about the operation of images overall within the culture that the reluctance to picture supervised whites contrasted sharply with the willingness of written representations to describe deviant and unreliable white workers as warranting, and subjected to, rigorous oversight.

Such, then, my journey: from illustrated scholarship to...what? I hope it is to scholarship sufficiently supple to cull from images information about how working people looked and yet capable as well of gauging pictures in their own terms and in instructive contrast to other representations. And, of course, I hope also that my end result will be scholarship touched by richer understanding of how the past speaks to us.