The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885-1918

摘要

Over the past fifteen years Elizabeth Edwards has shaped a research methodology that moves from looking at photographs to thinking with photographs. Through her focus on the interplay between the context and content of photographs, she has extended our understanding of the role that photographs play in shaping ideas about race and culture, and the importance of materiality to the 'essence' of a photographic object. Edwards's mode is ethnographic and archival - that the cultural context of creation is forever part of the meaning of the photograph while new meanings may accrue over the lives of the photographs. Her methodology derives in part from her training in medieval history and considerable experience as a photographic curator.