Abstract
This essay grapples with the challenges of historicizing photographs. Due to the limited documentation of their production, and their ephemerality, we tend to contextualize them primarily within the reports they illustrate. Thus the periodicals’ often tendentious meanings inform, and often displace, the visual evidence offered by the images themselves. In an effort to recuperate the nondiscursive evidence of news photographs, the author focuses on one image from 1939 of Marian Anderson and the crowd that gathered to hear her famous Lincoln Memorial recital—a photograph that circulated in numerous newspapers of the day. He abandons the standard, semantic approach to interpreting the photograph and instead works to construct a thicker, more material understanding of the world it helped realize.
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