Over the rest of the summer, I’m going to look at some series of photos from my catalog where I am trying to look at them as a historian might. Not an art historian, exactly, because art historians come to the same archive knowing something about the artistic form they’re looking at, though they may eventually converge with the thinking of a historian who wants to know more about what this archive is evidence of, exactly: a life? a place? a moment in time?
So here I start with photos of dogs in my catalog of 26,000 images. I imagine that a historian finding these as a sort of unaccessioned “box” would only know that they belonged to a single individual and have data on each photo in terms of when it entered the archive and for the later images, some EXIF metadata (though that is complicated in this case by the fact that some of these images had to be recovered from a hard drive crash and in a few cases they’re not the original RAW images and have lost some associated EXIF data.)
What I think I’d be able to figure out also is that a fairly substantial number of the photos were scans made from earlier formats, whether those were printed photos, slides or otherwise, as they would all have creation dates from a weekend or so but plainly span a much longer chronological sequence. In a few cases I’d have chronological information on the photo scan itself to verify that.
So if I was looking at dogs, here’s where I’d see if I stuck with the older scanned images.
Contextually, I’d see that these dog photos are located within a much bigger archive of what seem to be family photos. What I think I’d see as a historian who didn’t have any other information is that there aren’t very many pictures of dogs overall in comparison to all the other photos of that family. (There are a couple of others I’m not posting here that are even blurrier than the one with the Coke can, but only about another 5 or 6.)
Three dogs appear more than once—the golden retriever, the dachshund, and the Irish wolfhound. Or at least they seem to be the same. The dachshund images are older, the retriever images seem to be more recent, and the wolfhound photos seem a bit more recent still, partly judging just by the relative quality of the images, implying a better camera. The same older man appears twice with the dachshund and what seems to be the same boy appears once with the golden retriever and once with the dachshund (who, if it the same one, does look older.) There’s a date—1967—that puts two similar photos in specific sequence.
Historians are quick to tell you that history is not a science, but most historians approach evidence carefully and skeptically. You’d have the whole archive, and that would let you recognize some of the domestic interiors and associate them with the same family. You’d be able to align the people in the photos with many other images of them without dogs. You might be able to make a good guess about who took many of the photos—at a number of points in the archive, a man who seems to be the father appears with a camera, even later on with a camera on a tripod, and he is absent from many other photos of children, of grandparents, and of his wife.
You couldn’t be sure that all the dogs are in fact dogs of this family. The people in some images could be visiting dogs, or the children could be at a family member’s house interacting with the dog there. The dachshund has a clear association with the older man, whom you’d probably guess to be a grandparent of the children given the wider archive.
Against that broader archive, you might be tempted to wonder why the dogs don’t appear very often. But you’d have to sit down and try to tag the photos overall against their possible contexts. Many seem to be vacation photos, others are associated with recurrent holidays and family gatherings—Christmas, Halloween, Easter. Not many seem to be spontaneous snapshots or portraits taken in more “everyday” contexts, where dogs might show up often (or not), though the retriever looking down and the white dog in the courtyard seem like spontaneous shots.
From this archive alone, what else might you say about dogs? The family seems to have preferred breeds. The images seem affectionate but mostly the dogs don’t seem to be at the center of the images—an art historian might note that in formal terms, only the wolfhound seems to be the subject of the photographs (and that those are more carefully composed images generally, perhaps because the photographer’s skill with the medium has developed or at least that his eye is more attentive).
But this is what I mean by the need for caution, because what you wouldn’t know by looking at this archive of scanned images is whether you’re actually seeing the totality of the family archive in question. Perhaps all you’re seeing is what the scanner was interested in reproducing, or all that survived to be scanned. Archives are the product first of serendipity—materials fall away or get lost from custody for all sorts of random reasons—and then of attention, what someone deemed worth saving, preserving, and transmitting. Maybe these are the dogs that mattered to the scanner. Maybe all the other dog photos were too blurry to bother with. Maybe the dogs in some images are with people the scanner didn’t care about or didn’t know.
Of course, because I do have inside information, I know that what I would see as a stranger is misleading in other ways. We had a lot of dogs, and we were both unlucky and careless as dog owners. There are at least six dogs who are not in any photos, even in the bigger pre-scanning archive. Some because they weren’t around long enough to get photographed—my mother went and got two rescue puppies one weekend and they died of distemper within a week, for example. Some had serious health issues—the Airedale terrier in these photos had severe hip dysplasia and had to be put down (though my parents told us at the time that she had “gone to live in the desert where her hip wouldn’t hurt her”). The wonderful little dog in the courtyard above was hit by a car not long after that photo was taken.
If the hypothetical historian didn’t have anyone to talk to about the photos and nothing else, they’d never guess at any of that. To make anything else of the photos—say, whether they represent typical patterns of dog ownership for middle to upper-middle class families across the latter half of the 20th Century in the United States—they’d need a much vaster array of data, at which point this archive would stop being of much use or interest. Even in formal visual terms, there’s not much to work with until or unless it’s set in the context of all those other family photos, at which point maybe you could say something about the staging of family life or childhood.
And yet, of course, for me, every single image is overflowing with meaning, even the ones that are more mysterious to me (why is Biscuit drinking a Coke? who is that brown dog? what’s the name of the dog in the photo with my father as a boy, a question that no one alive could answer?) Which I think is a reminder of how archives are also in some sense like an orange squeezed dry of most of its juice. By the time we have to make sense of them, much of the sense has left them already.
The play “Here There Are Blueberries” (NY run ends 6/30) is a brilliantly staged detective story recounting the process by which photo archivists and historians work to reconstruct and understand a historical moment through the painstaking analysis of an album of black & white photos documenting everyday life among co-workers. The photo album, discovered in 2007, was created by a senior German officer at Auschwitz and documents everyday mundane office gatherings, family life, and recreation among officers and staff who administered Auschwitz. The play raises interesting questions about what gets documented and by whom, what gets lost and then found, and what conclusions one can derive about the unseen from a collection of seemingly banal old photos
Godard’s Comment ca va? is a film essay on the challenges of reading old photos.