Picturing History

Abstract

Picturing History Martha A. Sandweiss (bio) Matthew Frye Jacobson, The Historian’s Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present. UNC Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, 2019. 192 pp. $37.50. Matthew Frye Jacobson’s collection of photographs, paired with extended captions, echoes an older tradition of photographic books about American life. But unlike Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, or Robert Frank, whose visual aesthetics shape his way of seeing, Jacobson is both photographer and writer here. He creates his own photographic archive, and then he interprets it. In so doing, he raises larger questions about photographs as a kind of primary source evidence and about how historians might engage photographs as historical documents. Jacobson began his project during that “first season of Obama,” (p. 1) between the spring of 2008 and the presidential inauguration in January 2009. He listened as people around him made sense of Obama’s election as a historical moment, with reference to the long American struggle for racial and social justice and the political battles over Civil Rights. In a nation not known for its historical sensibilities, this seemed notable, so he set out to create a photographic documentary of the inauguration. But then he kept going, through the Great Recession and the events he later came to see as emblematic of the rise of Trumpism—the challenges to Obama’s legitimacy, the dueling voices of the Tea Party and Occupy movements, the battles over gay marriage, Islamophobia, and immigration. Between 2009 and 2014, he traveled the country and made some 4,000 images from which he created an online archive and an exhibition. Later he sat down to go through the archive he had created, selected about 120 images for this book, and in 2016 wrote his text. Jacobson wants to think about “history as an instrument for analyzing the contours and meaning of present conditions” (p. 1). But as he straddles the conventional dividing lines between the work of a historian and that of a photojournalist or other kind of photographer, he disrupts the usual rules of the historian’s craft. He is not, here, just looking at the present and asking how historical developments led us to this point. He is also looking around him and, with his camera, trying to see what will be useful evidence in the [End Page 311] future. He looks backwards and forwards at the same time. Or, as he puts it, he “was learning to read the visual artifact of the past as it reveals itself in the present” and also “learning new habits of mind by which the historical imagination is never at rest, by which every landscape is made to render comment on ‘this historical moment’” (p. 155). In his text—long picture captions sandwiched between a brief introduction and afterword—he uses a first-person voice to ponder what it means to see and understand the world through photographic evidence. Each pairing of image and text, he writes, is a “freestanding piece in its own right, a meditation” (p. 5). He frames his larger questions and then organizes his work in six thematically arranged sections focusing on Obama as an icon, the broad economic consequences of the Great Recession, the impact of that recession on the real estate market, an “American Studies road trip,” the ugly racialized backlash against Obama, and a brief section of “reflections” that sounds a more aspirational—if not quite hopeful—tone. Jacobson’s photographs are all in black and white. He concedes they may convey less “data” than color images (p. 10). But he argues that they better arrest a viewer’s attention and more fully engage their historical imagination, in part because we have become accustomed to seeing historical photographs in black and white. This is an interesting claim that acknowledges the photographer’s aesthetic debt to the ways of seeing pioneered by photographers like Lange, Evans, and Frank. He shares their interest in vernacular architecture, signs and posters. Like them, he takes note of the ironies created by the juxtapositions of signage that says one thing and surroundings that suggest another. And he borrows many of their motifs and strategies. An...