Pieces of the Past: Early Photomontage and the Voice of History

Abstract

A key dimension of photomontage is the way that its formal features – and consequent debates about the probity of making a photograph out of multiple sources – illuminate some of the fundamental problems of representation in the late nineteenth century. Among these was the question of whether an account of the past was properly presented as an unmediated transmission of fact, or demonstrably fashioned by an author: whether the tools of representation were to be submerged or emphasised. This article examines the parallels between the strategies of authorial visibility in early photomontage and the rhetorical approaches adopted by historians to modulate their presence in their texts. In particular, this study investigates the convergences of historiography and photomontage around the collapse of the Second Empire, a moment that witnessed powerful shifts in the conception of the voice of the historian as well as the production of photomontages that grappled with – and even thematised – the problem of their constructedness. An important but little-known group of photomontages by Eugène Appert, depicting the Imperial family in exile as well as the emerging Third Republic from which they fled, registers these conjunctions in their full complexity.