The Historian's View: How Photographs and Images Create History

How art, graphics, photographs, cinema, and other media can be used to give meaning to life lived in other times. How to teach photography today? How to read an era through photography? The main point this book seeks to support and illustrate is that images, like texts and oral testimonies, are important historical sources. They capture eyewitness testimony. There is nothing new in this idea, as evidenced by the famous image known as "The Arnolfini Portrait," that is, the husband and wife, in the National Gallery in London. The portrait is signed: Jan van Eyck fuit hic, "Jan van Eyck was here," as if the artist acted as a witness at the wedding. Ernst Gombrich called the "principle of the eyewitness" the rule that existed in different cultures, according to which, starting from the ancient Greeks, an artist could depict only what an eyewitness could actually see from a certain point at a certain moment.