The readings and tutorials for the past two weeks have provided us with much fodder for discussion and consideration. In my first blog for this week I focused mostly on several points raised in the seven-part article by Errol Morris on the controversy surrounding the FSA photos from the Great Depression. For this blog I want to continue with those ideas but focus more on several points raised by some of my classmates. Sheri, Maggie, and Celeste all bring up a really sound point. How you use a photograph (or any image really, just as with any source) shapes the ways in which we approach it and what questions we ask of it. For example, many of us take photos to commemorate notable events in our lives (like graduations, birthdays, marriages, etc, etc, etc) but that doesn’t necessarily mean that historians in the future will use those photos to talk about those particular events. Sheri describes a photo she took of herself and her children to mark a particular event in her educational career (the photo was taken the day after, but posed to make it look like it was of the day). Her husband, however, is not in the photo and that’s not because he was taking it. In reality he was out of town and so he missed the event altogether. As Sheri muses, scholars-in-the-future could employ her image as evidence to illustrate certain types of family dynamics during the turn of the 21st century. Yet she took the photo to mark a special occasion and took it the day after the event actually occurred. That information, while interesting and important, isn’t really that important for a historian exploring family dynamics, but it could be important to know for a historians exploring methods of remembrance.
One of the “history box” programs that the Virginia Historical Society offers is entitles “Teaching with Photographs: Virginia at the Turn of the 20th Century.” Unlike the other history boxes that use replica artifacts, documents, and images, this particular program uses only photographs. The educators (of which I was once in their number) would prompt students on what types of questions we could ask of these photos. Ultimately, the idea behind the program was to teach kids how to use images as primary sources. Now I will admit, our questions were far simpler than the questions we’ve been mulling over for the past two weeks. And I have much greater understanding of how to approach photographs now, but it was always a very interesting program. Often the first thing we would ask participants is what they thought they saw in the photo, before we would go into greater detail. Generally speaking, their answers weren’t that far afield (although the answers that young students came up with were truly spectacular) from what was happening in the photo.
Graduation photo of Leone Helen Holmes of Richmond, Virginia from the Foster Collection (1991.1.13910).
The best photo to illustrate this point is the one of Leone Helen Holmes. Most students assume that she’s poor because she’s black. They also think that the photo is a graduation photo and that she’s graduating college. Many assumed that it was taken at the ceremony and/or outside. In reality, Leone is from a (upper?) middle-class family (her father was a plumber), she has graduated and it is a graduation photo, but she didn’t go to college. This is a photo to commemorate her High school graduation and her completion of a teaching course. At the time in order to become a teacher in Virginia you only had to have a HS diploma (the framed diploma in the photo) and complete a summer course that was only a few weeks long (Leone is holding the certificate for the course in her hand). Leone is only 18 years old. She graduated from Armstrong HS (at the time called Richmond Colored Normal School) in May and returned as a fully certified teacher the following Fall. Leone only taught for a few years before resigning. At the time, it was customary, not mandated by law as some sources indicate, for Virgina women to abandon their careers upon marriage. Finally, the photo was taken in a studio with a painted background. The irony of all this, is that while most of this information can actually be gleaned from the photo, I learned it all by reading a description of the photo not the photo itself. However, the diploma does have her name on it which is how the museum was able to learn so much about her, so there is no reason why I couldn’t have done the same.
Now I look at this photo and all sorts of other questions come to mind and also how I could restore it to better learn from it. The lettering on the framed diploma isn’t clear. Her dress has some sort of pattern on it, perhaps lace or something else. The background is blurry. It also needs to be cropped. Why the hell do we need the door on the right-hand side I don’t know. There are some stains on the image and some damage around the sides. Luckily, the facsimile we used in the history box had been minimally restored. Looking at the original, however, makes me realize how more more restoration needs to be completed.
Editor’s Note: I actually started to play around with some the restoration techniques described in the lynda.com tutorial and such on this photo, but they didn’t work very well. This is due in part because I’m still not that adept at using Photoshop and the fact that the image is a very low resolution (a web optimized jpeg). I think I would have been better with the original tiff.
Clio in Binary 