Introduction: Oral History and Photography

Abstract

This book is about the “photographic turn” in oral history. Historians’ interest in photographs—their “discovery of old photographs”—dates back, according to Raphael Samuel’s observations in Great Britain, to the early 1960s.3 Historians back then evaluated their visual evidence much less critically than their traditional textual sources, treating photographs, as Samuel criticized, as “transparent reflections of fact.”4 Cultural and family historians as well as archivists seized on photographs in the 1970s, concentrating on their assumedly self-evident informational value.5 Over the last two decades, the use of photographs has come under greater critical scrutiny. In turning the object of its research into a category of analysis, the discipline of history has moved toward a “pictorial turn,” a “visual turn,” an “iconic turn,” or, more focused, a “turn to photography.”6