Same conceit as the last time I did this: if I were a historian who had just gotten into an unaccessioned collection of photos in an archive that had no overall collection metadata associated with it, what could I make of these images?
This time, the historian would have EXIF data on all of the photos, so they could quickly build a map and timeline.
The historian would know that most of the images of the two main dogs were associated with two residential addresses in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, or at locations within two days’ drive of Philadelphia to the north and south. (Among the places that would show up would be the Delaware shore, Acadia National Park, the Adirondacks, the northern suburbs of Washington D.C., and St. Johnsbury Vermont.)
The two dogs appear over roughly 16-17 years worth of images.
There would be a lot of images of the dogs associated with a child from a young age into adulthood and an adult woman, and only occasional shots of them with the same adult man. That would likely imply that the man was the one holding the camera, as it was in the first archive of dog images. Most of the shots would be from a DSLR (two different ones) but a fair number were taken with cameraphones.
There would be, in total, hundred of photos of the two dogs both separately and apart. Here’s the first place where an incautious historian who had seen the first archive and knew the two groups of images were associated somehow because they were in the same collection could make a mistake. They could assume that in the first the relatively small number of photos of many family dogs and the second the very large number of photos of two family dogs would indicate some different attitude towards the dogs themselves or towards dog-keeping. The only explanation you really need of the difference is material: it’s the difference between film photography and digital photography. Film photography required buying film, being careful while loading it into a camera, and taking it to a developer (or having your own darkroom), all of which entailed effort and cost. Moreover, film photography had substantial storage requirements: hundreds of developed photos took up space, whereas even early on, thousands of digital photographs could be stored on a single device. Developed film photographs were easily lost and damaged, and while digital photographs sometimes don’t survive forward migration from one hard drive or cloud storage location to another, keeping a big collection is a different kind of thing. (Whether digital photographs end up in archives a century from now, on the other hand, might be in a peculiar sense less likely than printed film photographs.)
On the other hand, it would be hard not to make something of the consistency of this archive. These two dogs show up almost everywhere that their owners go. (If you had EXIF photos in the collection of this family without their dogs, you’d see that almost the only place the dogs don’t go is where airplanes are involved in getting there.) They’re photographed from many angles, in posed and spontaneous situations.
You might even infer something of their relationship in that while the two dogs are sometimes together, it’s hard to miss a discomfort or rivalry in their juxtaposition.
That might be the eye of the photographer finding that a situation worth photographing, which is something else that the historian could think about, trending a bit towards the ground of art history. The dogs are often photographed doing very doggy things: playing with balls, going on walks, sleeping, running off-leash, being held or hugged by owners, begging for treats. And very much not photographed doing other doggy things: there are no photographs of them pooping, barking, fighting with or growling at a stranger dog, eating their regular dog food: situations not considered to be appropriate or interesting for photography, or situations where the photographer actually had to attend to the dog.
You’d note that both dogs appear to be purebreds (Boston terrier, basset hound). They have the same leashes for most of their lives. The EXIF data would confirm that they both lived a long time, with the Boston being in images by himself for a few years before the young hound shows up and the hound being by herself for a few years at the end. (The historian would find some belly-rubbing shots that would confirm that the one was male and the other female.)
As with the other archive, you’d quickly come to a point where you couldn’t say much more without a larger framework of information and evidence. Film v. digital aside, was there a shift in attitudes towards dogs across generations generally in the country? Did parents being more involved with the lives of children have an impact on dog ownership? Or that just this family?
Dog owners often think that the personality of their pets shows through in photos or images, but would that be visible to a stranger some distant years from now? If so, that might again be something created by the photographer, knowingly or otherwise—framing, shooting and keeping images that tell a story familiar to him and his family, while never even thinking to grab the camera for moments that don’t connect.
I think on careful reading, it would not be hard to see that the photographer was telling a story of the dogs as antagonists, in one case through juxtaposed Photoshoppery
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This is where in my lifetime as a historian, I think scholars have become much more savvy and sophisticated in reading archives. There was a point in the 1960s and 1970s where some historians were still thinking about evidence in a rather naively positivistic way—that they were looking for bodies of evidence that they saw as more objective, more ‘eyewitnessed’, more disinterested. That was tied into an understanding of official and administrative power as looking down on society from above, making it legible. (The death of James Scott is here on my mind, and I will have more to say on that later this week.) An archive that had a palpable authorship to it, that was telling stories, was to be distrusted more. But all evidence that survives to be deposited is telling stories twice over: first for itself, second in its selection and assemblage in an archive. That is not a fallen or corrupted state. Storytelling happens from the world and in the world. It contains evidence of what it was drawn from and it is evidence of the past in the story it tells.
You wouldn’t conclude that the dogs were in fact great friends and the photographer falsely determined to make them enemies. The story of antagonism in the images was told from somewhere real, often witnessed. Sophisticated historical interpretation might just wonder if there were other moments that didn’t fit the story, or if all dogs in all households could have a rivalrous story told about them. Or if rivalrous stories and domesticity had a larger relationship in that past society. And so on. That kind of interpretative thinking may make historical scholarship frustrating to read for people who just want a definitive truth shorn of qualifiers and uncertainties, but I’d rather the more winding and tentative path, most of the time.
Even when I know, as I do in this case, that the simplest story, of two dogs not liking each other very much, is the unvarnished truth. Or so sayeth the storyteller.
Ooh, and historians do get annoyed when our neat narratives get disrupted by someone pointing to the archival holes.