Towards a History through Photography: An Introduction

Abstract

It is no secret that images hold a special place in historiography. We speak of a complicit though complicated relationship between images and history, a relationship that has long been vital because images have always provided important insights into history and were accepted as equal to other written source materials. This is certainly true for those historians who work on antiquity or the early modern period, and the medievalists. Yet, with the chemical-technological invention of photography in the 1830s this relationship seems to have experienced serious frictions.