"Doing the Rest": The Uses of Photographs in American Studies

Abstract

familiar to every student of American culture. Although we may profess the belief that picture is worth a thousand words, we have become accustomed to looking at photographs as decorations instead of learning to appreciate the photograph itself as a source of information about the subject at hand. This is not to say that the photograph can stand alone as sole documentation of a topic, but photographs do contain unique information that can only be communicated and analyzed in visual terms. This essay is an attempt to define the differences between the photograph and the written word and to suggest some questions which should be asked when approaching a photograph or collection of photographs in research and teaching. Nineteenth-century inventions in photography created a revolution in communication and provided a technological method for large-scale recording of the social and physical landscape. The camera went everywhere to war, to the home, to explore new territories, to city streets indeed to look at every aspect of society and the environment that imagination could conjure up and circumstance provide. These visual documents became part of a large mass of images preserved in family albums, in scrapbooks, in files of studio photographers, in government records, and in loose assortments of memorabilia. Though each photograph records only one instant