Towards a History through Photography: An Introduction

Abstract

It is no secret that images hold a special place in historiography. We speakof a complicit though complicated relationship between images and history, arelationship that has long been vital because images have always provided importantinsights into history and were accepted as equal to other written sourcematerials. This is certainly true for those historians who work on antiquity or theearly modern period, and the medievalists. Yet, with the chemical-technologicalinvention of photography in the 1830s this relationship seems to have experiencedserious frictions.