VISUALIZING HISTORY: THE PAST IN PICTURES

Images make history. They document events, preserve memories, allow us to witness at a distance, and move us to act. Images can serve as both records and sources for the writing of history. With funding from the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar program, this seminar investigates the history of “writing” history in images (what Hayden White termed “historiophoty”) from the rise of print culture circa 1450 to the global spread of digital media in the present, with an emphasis on the Western tradition and experience, including its imperial contexts. By investigating the many ways in which histories have been told with and in images, we aim to contextualize the current ubiquity of visually mediated evidence, documentation, and narrative.

In the age of digital media, the power of images to transmit information in the present and craft accounts about the past appears obvious. That power, however, rests on a series of widely held and sometimes contradictory assumptions, among them: that images can be trusted as evidence if their provenance and accuracy are judged adequate; that images have greater emotional impact than words, but are on their own insufficient to write history and thus serve as illustrations to textual narratives; and that images are more universal and more capable of traversing geographic distances and cultural differences than words, except when impeded by unbreachable culturally-specific interpretive walls. The epistemic work of images, their evidentiary status in relation to words and things, and their perceived value as both historical sources and historical accounts have shifted again and again in the period our seminar examines, as have notions of what “history” itself means.

This Mellon Sawyer Seminar, hosted by the USC Visual Studies Research Institute and directed by Professors Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa Schwartz, includes the following programs:

Mellon Sawyer Seminar
Visual History: The Past In Pictures
Workshop 5—The 20th Century
Group Discussion

Workshop 5—The 20th Century Hillary Chute ”History, Witness, Print: Callot, Goya, Spiegelman”

Workshop 5—The 20th Century
Leonard Folgarait
”Series and Narrative in Visual History: Diego Rivera’s National Palace Murals”

Workshop 5—The 20th Century
Group Discussion

Workshop 5—The 20th Century
Stephen Bann
”Visual History and The ‘Manufacture of the Past’”

Workshop 5—The 20th Century
Catherine Clark
”Twentieth-Century History: Profession and Pastime”

Workshop 4—The 19th Century
Group Discussion

Workshop 4—The 19th Century
Sumathi Ramaswamy
”Empire & History, Interrupted”

Workshop 3—The 18th Century
Darrin McMahon
“Illuminating Time: History and Historicity in the Age of Enlightenment”

Workshop 3—The 18th Century
Susan Siegfried
“Visual Compilations and Visual Histories in the Eighteenth Century”

Workshop 3—The 18th Century
Andrew Schulz
“Exoticism and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Visual Culture”

Workshop 3—The 18th Century
Group Discussion

Workshop 2—The 16th and 17th Centuries
Peter Miller
“Antiquarianism and its Images”

Workshop 2—The 16th and 17th Centuries
Christopher Wood
“The Referential Image”

Workshop 2—The 16th and 17th Centuries
Evonne Levy
“The Council of Trent in Images:
Subjects, Audiences, and Intermediality”

Workshop 2—The 16th and 17th Centuries
Group Discussion