Our roundtable brings together historians from across geographical regions who take different approaches to photographic archives but who share a commitment to thinking through how photography affects historical method. Photographic material revises long-standing conversations about archives and power in historical practice as well as the positionality of the historian.

Photography generates similar concerns as textual sources to interrogate the processes of production, circulation, and preservation that bring photographic material to the archive. Photographic historian Laura Wexler argues that photographs do not document “the way things were,” but instead reveal the past to be a “record of choices” that we must learn to recognize and evaluate. Re-embedding photographs in the contexts of their production allows us to refuse what Ariella Aïsha Azoullay calls the imperial operation of the shutter, overcoming the demarcation between past and present, photographer and subject, those who profit from the photograph and those whose image forms the basis of extraction. Elucidating the grammar of photography can help historians unlearn our complicity with the ideologies that shape the photographic record.

Each participant turns to what Pedro Monaville calls an “archival incident,” in order to reflect on the historian’s relationship to the photograph, to historical subjects, and the practices that shape the historical record. We examine photographs of human subjects from state and institutional archives in Mexico, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the United Kingdom. We interrogate the processes of selection, framing, circulation, and reception that shaped the meanings of the photograph in its time. We evaluate how these photographs bring social bodies into being and the exclusions that shape their constructions of citizenship and modern subjectivity. We also consider how the desires of the historian construct the photograph’s relationship to the past, its significance in the present, and its possibilities for bringing potential futures into being.

Our engagement with photographic archives raises not only methodological questions but also ethical concerns. By reflecting on a personal encounter with the photograph, we work through the relationship between the historian and historical subjects, and ask whether it is possible to understand the desires, intentions, and sentiments of photographic subjects. We believe that historians have an obligation to be sensitive to the agendas of photographic subjects that exist outside of, and independently from, the archival practices which bring them to our attention. Engaging photographic archives can never simply be a work of recovery, for in many cases it is impossible, and perhaps unethical, to recover those agendas. By recognizing that the practices that produced the photograph and brought them to the archive are shaped by power, we encourage a position of radical uncertainty rather than an acceptance that photographs can ever show us “the way things were.”